


The Only Animal I Couldn't Fight

by argle_fraster



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BUCKETS OF ANGST, Cannibalism, Gen, Graphic Description, M/M, NaNoWriMo, Not Season 3 Compliant, Pack Dynamics, Plotty, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Shapeshifting, Slow Build, Souls, The Author Regrets Nothing, Violence, meta meta meta, no seriously graphic violence, symbolism is your friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-17 13:06:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 48,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A girl coming into her own unexpected power, a boy who wades heedlessly into danger, and a man who was never meant to be an Alpha: they are three parts of something deeper and more powerful than they know, and they will have to rely on each other when they face an enemy they couldn't have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> IT'S NANOWRIMO LET'S SEE HOW LONG THIS GETS THE OUTLINE IS 5 PAGES IN WORD KTHNXBI

She's in a forest.

The smell of the damp earth, rich and heady, like a perfume steeped too long that has grown too poignant, is the only thing she can focus on - there's light streaming through the overhead tree cover, but it's faint and orange and angled, coming from a sun quickly setting past the horizon. Soon, she knows, it'll be dark, and the involuntarily shiver jolts up her spine. The trees aren't safe once the sun goes down, and she can't find the way out. She suppresses her panic, swallowing it down in a thick lump in her throat, and starts forward, because the only thing to do is to try and find the exit.

The sun dips, and the woods fill with shadows. Lydia's breath comes out quicker; there's panic on the back of her tongue, where the bitter tastes register - it tastes an awful lot like blood, a sharp, coppery pang she wants to spit out. She keeps pushing forward, batting aside branches and leaves, and some of them reach out and scrape the side of her cheek. She can feel the marks they leave behind when she brushes up with her fingers, and the pads come away stained with red.

She can hear them out there, in the trees. They are waiting for the sun to go down, and she's got precious few minutes before it does just that; once the darkness falls, she will be at their mercy. She breathes deep, shaking, entire body trembling from the cold that has come from nowhere. There's no end to the trees, no path to follow - she keeps surging forward, but she only finds more withered trunks and gnarled branches, hanging low and in her way.

She has moments, maybe less. Lydia stops. Her body freezes, and she knows it's pointless. There's something in the trees, circling her, waiting to strike, and she has no weapon to fight against it. She balls her hands into fists anyway, because she feels the sweep of anger and terror spike through her - the same feeling that day on the lacrosse pitch, that night she'll never forget. She can't repeat that again.

"I know you're there," she calls, feeling stupid even as the words leave her mouth.

The only response she gets is a low chuckle, the kind that makes her knees go weak. She's going to die - they are going to kill her. Her body, in a final, desperate move to survive, lunges forward again in a dead sprint, moving so quickly through the trees that the branches are digging long, jagged lines in her forearms. She ignores the pain that spikes up hot and fresh, mirroring the sting of tears in her eyes. She can think only of moving, of running, of _leaving_ \- she has to get away.

They are behind her, and they are moving; she can hear the echoes of twigs snapping a half-second after her own footsteps. A sob catches in her throat and nearly chokes her. She's seen these trees before - she's going in a circle. She stops and tries to catch her breath, can't seem to find the oxygen she needs. The woods are a circle, a maze, a spiral that just keeps going and going, and she is caught in the middle of it without an exit.

A branch snaps behind her and she whirls out of instinct, knowing that if she is going to die, then she's going to face it head-on this time, and then she opens her eyes to stare at the stucco on her bedroom ceiling.

She's breathing hard. A dream - it was only a dream.

The sheets are twisted beneath her, and it takes her a second to get her hand free from them. She feels infinitely exhausted. Lydia tries to steady herself, find her center, and risks a glance at her bedside table and the clock there - 5:49 AM. She might as well get up, because she knows that returning to sleep won't be an option. She runs her hands over her face and pushes away the tendrils of sweat-soaked hair that have plastered themselves to her fever-hot skin, and then pauses. In the light of the morning sun, streaming in her bedroom window, she sees the inside of her arms.

There are scrapes and drags of torn of flesh there, littering her flesh from her wrists to her elbows.

They are the remnants of tree branches scratching against her as she ran.

Lydia sits up, examining herself; she drags one finger along the length of the longest cut, feeling the blood that has clotted and stopped the flow. She's shaking, so hard she almost can't follow the zigzagging line of it. Then, feeling vulnerable and self-conscious, despite being alone in her room, she tugs the sheets up to cover the marks.

She'll have to wear long sleeves to school, there's no way around it. As long as her mother doesn't see anything, Lydia might be able to get away with no one noticing until the scratches heal and fade into barely visible white lines against her skin.

She wants to cry, but even as the heat gathers behind her eyes, she knows it won't do any good. Crying is a useless, selfish action, and she's better than that.

She reaches over to flip off the alarm setting on her clock, and resigns herself to finding something with sleeves from her closet.

\--

"There was some kind of accident last night," Stiles says, without preamble, as he sets his tray down on the unwashed cafeteria table and tries not to think too hard about what's really in the meatloaf that's currently sitting next to the mashed potatoes. "I heard my dad get the call about it this morning as he was heading out."

"Animal attack?" Scott asks. He's devouring his own lunch, but then again, he's never been a very good one for self-preservation. He stops mid-bite, gaze straying to the empty table in the corner that used to be populated.

Stiles knows what Scott's thinking about. He tries not to think about it, himself.

"No," he says. "Some kind of kitchen accident. I guess a little kid got into the drawers in the kitchen, with the knives."

"So why'd they send your dad there?" Scott asks; his mouth is full of unidentified meat products, attention already moved on from the gaping absence of Erica and Boyd.

"Because a kid _died_ ," Stiles tells him.

Scott sighs, dropping bits of brownie back onto the tray. "But it wasn't an animal attack, so it probably wasn't the Alpha pack."

"See, speaking of the Alpha pack," Stiles starts, "where _is_ our friendly neighborhood death-wishing enemy these days? Shouldn't they be, I don't know, doing something? Gloating? Taunting? Attempting harm onto our persons?"

Scott shrugs. From Scott, that's an answer half the time.

"Okay, while I appreciate your calm demeanor in the face of almost certain death, I think we need to be ready for something here," Stiles tells him. "They have part of the pack, and they're obviously still hanging around here, and why are they not attacking us when the pack is decimated and Jackson's gone, and Derek's power is weak?"

He gets a blank stare across the table. Sighing, Stiles picks up his brownie - at least he'll eat that, as the chocolate seems relatively safe.

"It's like you don't understand strategy at all," he says.

"Well, I haven't spent the last year of my life playing MMORGs," Scott points out.

"No, only half of it, the half you don't spend pining for Allison."

He feels bad as soon as the words leave, because Scott's face falls, expression softening and growing open.

"Shit," Stiles sighs. "I'm sorry, man. I know, I just-"

"They're still here," Scott interrupts. He seems to have forgotten about the rest of his food, werewolf metabolism be damned. "It's a good thing that they're still here, right? They didn't skip town after Gerard. I've still got a chance."

Post-break up, and Stiles _still_ hasn't gotten his best friend back.

"Yeah," he says, and his tongue feels heavy in his mouth, "you've still got a chance."

They are silent for awhile, with Scott digging into his meatloaf and Stiles picking around his. He spots Lydia entering from the other side of the room, looking perfect and untouchable with her hair streaming out behind her in a gleaming banner. He raises a hand to her, to wave, and her gaze settles on him for all of a second before she looks away, ignoring the gesture, and sits with Danny instead. Stiles drops his arm back down to his side, knuckles hitting hard against the plastic table seat.

"We should have told her," he says.

"Told who?"

Stiles isn't even hungry for the brownie anymore. He shoves the tray towards the center of the table, finished with the whole ordeal. "Lydia. We should have told her about everything."

"It would have put her in danger," Scott says.

"Sure," Stiles scoffs, "because not telling her really kept her safe, didn't it?"

\--

Later, when Stiles is supposed to be working on his essay on The Scarlet Letter for English class, he can't focus on Hawthorne and opens up the document on his computer labeled "Balancing Equations Notes.doc" - a better name than his porn folder, at least, and enough to keep snooping parties out of it. The document has 28 pages separated into sections, and it isn't much - certainly not as in-depth as Gerard's had been - but for a bestiary made completely out of personal experiences and Google-fu research, Stiles doesn't think it's half-bad.

There are a lot of holes. The page on the Alpha pack has more question marks than words on it, and Stiles drops his chin down onto his hands, one elbow slipping off the desk. The problem is that there's nothing to _write_ , because he doesn't know anything, and apart from the cryptic warning vaguely aimed in their direction, Derek hasn't been very forthcoming with the information about it.

The top of the page says only _Alpha Pack_ followed by a blank outline auto-formatted in Word. So far, research on a pack of werewolves made up entirely of Alphas has netted absolutely nothing, though Stiles wants to blame the internet's general lack of solid knowledge on the werewolf idea in general that isn't related to Taylor Lautner for that.

Hands poised over the keyboard, Stiles pauses a moment, and then types, next to 'I.', _They have Erica and Boyd._

He can't think of anything else to say. Maybe there _isn't_ anything else to say. He sits back against his desk chair, pushing it in a lazy circle with the heels of his feet, metal cold even through the cotton-layer of his socks. All summer, nothing, just the lingering sensation of being watched and the slowly fading hope that Erica and Boyd were ever going to come back. Why go to the trouble of painting a warning on the side of Derek Hale's burned-out house if you aren't going to go through with it?

Feeling weary, Stiles leans forward onto his desk again, head in his hands. He's tired of this; he's tired of the perpetual waiting, the fear, the notion that every day he could be attacked by some other supernatural creature and die. He's tired of the nights spent furiously combing the internet for information that isn't straight out of a fantasy romance novel and hours spent with his gaze going bleary as he tries to translate the archaic Latin. He's just _tired_ , and he has been for a very long time.

He clicks the red 'X' and closes his homemade bestiary. Both Hawthorne and creatures of the night are going to have to wait - research machine Stiles is officially shut down for the next few hours.

\--

The moon is a sliver in the sky, just a fragment of what it could be, and Derek should be able to feel it more, even half-hidden by the clouds, just _because_. He isn't sure when he lost the ability to just _know_ what phase the moon was in - maybe it was Gerard, maybe it was the kanima, maybe it was Peter.

Hell, maybe it was Kate Argent, and it's taken him this long to identify the gaping wound.

He could be at the subway station, where at least solid feet of cement and metal would keep him from really noticing the things he can't do anymore, but he's not; he's at the remnants of his own house, the bits that are still charred and still festering. Sometimes, he thinks he can still hear the screams, the stifled yells, the choking coughs that must have gone on for hours as the fire burned them all alive, roasting flesh over and over faster than the bodies could heal.

Derek presses his palm against the boards, the relatively structurally-sound porch that has held up despite everything else, and imagines them humming there. He wonders if they are still here, bits of them trapped in the scorch marks that litter the steps down to the cellar. He's never bothered to repair the parts that are falling apart, just like he's never bothered to paint over the warning sign left by the Alpha pack on his front door. He's sitting in front of it now, an easy target, waiting for someone to come and finish what was promised - only no one ever does.

The Alpha pack never came, and Derek doesn't know what that means.

He should be able to feel his Betas, but he can't do that either. The tenuous web between them has been shattered by distance, by other wolves, by whatever the Alpha pack did - Derek's left the bond open in hopes that the frayed ends would be picked up again, but there's nothing. The tie goes both ways, and Erica and Boyd took the scissors to it themselves.

He was never meant to be an Alpha.

Derek runs a hand through his hair, wishing, not for the first time, that a stiff drink could help chase his troubles away. He thinks his father would be disappointed in him, but it was always meant to be Laura, anyway. Laura would know what to do; she'd take the lines and tug them, hard, keep everyone in check. Maybe she'd have put her foot down on humans running with the pack, and even that, Derek can't do, because without the humans he doesn't _have_ a pack. And that in itself is the biggest indicator that he's completely and utterly failed. Erica and Boyd are gone, Scott's toeing the line of Omega, Peter has disappeared again, and it's all Derek can do to hold his one remaining Beta in line.

If the moon were full, he'd shift and run in it. At least indulging his wolf side would calm his screaming instincts down a bit, if only because things are usually easier as the animal - more black and white, hard edges and easy answers. But it's like chasing a high; shifting back to human just makes the situation that much more daunting again.

He stands up, without telling his body to, and slams his fist into one of the porch support beams with his claws extended. The growl shakes his body just as the contact shakes the house - the battered structure creaks and groans, trembling for a second before stilling again. Derek wants to hit something again, but he doesn't. Instead, he leans forward, pressing his forehead against the wood, and wraps his fingers around the beam.

His life is just like this house: hollow, shaky, and very close to falling down around him.

\--

"Knock, knock," Lydia says, when Allison opens the door.

"Hey," Allison replies. She holds the door open a bit wider, not quite an invitation and not entirely a rejection, either. It's really all that Lydia needs to push inside, and Allison doesn't stop her.

Allison is still a little strange around her - strange like she thinks Lydia doesn't remember all the weird things that went on, all the ways that the other girl deliberately kept Lydia in the dark. She thinks that Lydia can't connect the lines from werewolves to translating archaic Latin to Allison wielding a crossbow - after all this time, Lydia is still confused as to why Allison would write her off so easily, but it isn't worth bringing up. Not now, not when things are still so odd and strained between them.

Allison's mother's death hangs between them, in the land of unspoken things, in the gaping holes they both know they carry with them but neither will address.

"Listen," Lydia says, in the foyer of a house that has been almost completely stripped of personality, "it's vitally important that we go shopping, because I'm not properly equipped for the new school year and the fall line is out at Macy's."

Allison looks dubious, biting her lower-lip. "I'm not sure I'm really-"

"So, let's not talk about this stuff," Lydia interrupts, before Allison can come up with what Lydia is sure is a wonderful excuse to why she _can't_ leave the house. "Let's not talk about the times you lied to me, or how I was possessed by a dead guy, or about how you tried to kill several people that we both hang out with, okay?"

"Lydia," Allison says, face crumpling.

"Save it," Lydia sighs. "And go shopping with me instead. I'm in desperate need of some new heels."

She knows that she's won as soon as Allison's shoulders slump forward, a concave arc that extends past the dark bits of her hair pulled up into a loose bun. "Let me get my purse," the other girl mumbles.

Lydia waits in the entryway, trying not to look at the walls. The scratches on her arms itch, like they're healing, but also like something is rubbing against them. Lydia presses a finger to one of them gingerly, through the fabric of her shirt, and the room around her seems to expand; it grows, heaving outward, and then sighs a bit. When it returns to normal, Lydia can see things painted on the walls - on the drywall, beneath the paisley wallpaper she's never liked. There are symbols there, in rows and lines, and a few that are haphazardly splattered at an angle. Greek and Latin and bits she doesn't know, can't identify, things that might be hieroglyphics or Hebrew.

The house is covered with them, and they are all concealed by the paper that's been thrown over the top and the empty picture frames - remnants of a life that used to be here, memories that have been burned. Lydia walks to the nearest wall, the one with the coat closet in the middle of it, and presses her palm against the wallpaper; she can feel the house buzzing, and it reverberates through her entire arm. Amazed, she trails her fingers down and across two of the larger symbols, circles that intersect and harsh, jagged lines crossing in the middle.

She feels like she's in the forest again. The webs on her arms ache in response to the hammering rhythm of her heart against her ribs. She breathes in, presses her finger to the middle of the symbol, and-

"Okay," Allison says, behind her, and the spell is broken. The light leaves the foyer with such intensity that it leaves Lydia gasping.

She looks at the paper, at the space where her hand is still hovering, and sees only pastel-covered flowers in cyma curves.

Allison is beside her, holding a coat and a small black handbag. "What's wrong?" she asks. There's genuine concern in her voice, a warmth that Lydia hasn't heard in awhile.

"Nothing," Lydia says. Her arm drops back down to her side. She can't quite shake the feeling that something is very _wrong_ here, or _was_ wrong here, and she's annoyed, frustrated, that she can't pick more of it out to make sense of it. "I just really hate your wallpaper."

"Yeah, it's ugly," Allison agrees, though it lacks heart.

\--

Stiles' father is up and dressed when Stiles stumbles into the kitchen for breakfast - his usual slightly stale Pop-tart and half a glass of whatever juice is still left in the fridge.

"I thought you worked the night shift tonight," Stiles says, pausing in the doorway with his fingers wrapped around the frame to keep his still sleep-laden body upright.

"There was another accident," his father replies.

Something about the way he says _accident_ makes Stiles think that it was anything but. He doesn't like the way his blood runs cold, the way his mind goes immediately to all the awful things it could be.

"Accident?" he repeats, and hopes that the weariness makes his tone nonchalant enough.

"Another kid died," his father says. He shakes his head, filling up his travel coffee mug - the mug Stiles has decorated when he was young, when his mother was still alive, at one of those cheesy places that takes your photo and laminates it onto whatever kitschy household item you could ever desire. _World's best dad!_ the coffee mug proclaims, in a scrawling children's chicken scratch. "Two in a week is just terrible luck."

Stiles doesn't believe in bad luck.

"Are you sure it wasn't another animal attack?" he asks, as he sinks down into one of the kitchen chairs. When his father turns to him, eyebrows raised, Stiles tries his best to look casual when he shrugs. "There was a huge rash of those attacks awhile back, I'm just making sure that I won't be mauled by a mountain lion in the school parking lot."

"No, it wasn't an animal," his father says. "Just a horrible mistake."

He leaves, taking most of the morning's coffee with him, and Stiles forgoes the entire breakfast idea to lunge back up the stairs to his bedroom. He's got the police scanner wirelessly tapped from his computer; courtesy of Danny, of course, in exchange for a month's worth of tutoring sessions that have managed to edge Stiles out for one of the valedictorian runner-up spots. He connects through his proxy and listens to the voices suddenly flooding his slightly out-of-date computer speakers.

_Four-year-old, run over by her father on his way to work. Man is hysterical, claims he didn't even see her, that she'd been in her room not a minute earlier as he'd left the house._

Stiles sits back in his chair, feeling heavy. Part of him had been terrified that it'd been Erica and Boyd - that someone had found them, pieces of them, littering the forest, that someone would have to scrape them off the side of the yellow line like road kill. And then he hates himself for feeling relieved that it wasn't them at all, because it was a kid. A god damn little kid, and Stiles is sitting in his desk chair thankful that his pseudo-friends the friendly neighborhood werewolves weren't killed when a family will never be the same.

It takes him a few moments to piece things together. Two children's "accidents" in the past couple of days, and Stiles is well-versed in the shadier going-ons of Beacon Hills to know that isn't karma or bad luck.

He opens the bestiary file again, mousing down to the page on the Alpha pack, and stares at it for a long while. He's going to be late for school if he doesn't get moving, and he's still got nothing to go off of, but he starts a new bullet point and quickly types in _using accidents to hide their kills?_ before hurrying to the bathroom to throw some cold water on his face.

Maybe eventually it'll succeed in washing the perpetual guilt off.

\--

"You're not even listening to me," Stiles says, as he follows Derek around the structurally unsound house with his hands jammed deep into the pocket of his hoodie.

"No, I'm not," Derek agrees. "Because you're talking nonsense, and it's a waste of my time."

"Derek, _listen_ ," Stiles tries; he almost trips over one of the beams that has splintered and fallen in two pieces in the shadows, and it's by the skin of his teeth that he manages to keep himself upright. "There's no way that two kids just coincidentally having 'accidents' isn't related to all this somehow."

Derek stops, at the edge of the house, staring into the woods beyond it - he used to be able to feel the trees here. He used to be able to know what was out there, to sense it moving; his wolf instincts used to bleed into his human life, and now he is only half of what he used to be, poorly-made and barely functional.

"Derek," Stiles says, again, with more force.

"Go home, Stiles," Derek tells him.

As usual, Stiles ignores him. "I'm doing you a favor here by bringing you this information. I know you don't exactly get out much."

It's a cheap shot at everything, considering Derek's existing with a fraction of his pack and a constant, looming threat on his doorstep.

"If there were animal kills, we'd know," Derek says, summoning patience he didn't even know he had. He turns, slowly, and finds Stiles leaning against the side of the house like he's waiting for a bus - he looks so out of place there, skin a wash of pale peach against the blistered, peeling burns on the wood. "It'd be the same as it always has been, and we'd all know that there were wolves involved."

"But what if the Alphas are covering their trail?" Stiles asks. "They have to know that my dad is starting to get suspicious."

"Why would they care?"

Stiles doesn't seem to have an answer for that. He frowns, gaze dipping off somewhere into the trees, and eventually shrugs; the action tugs the fabric of his sweatshirt taut around his shoulders.

"Maybe they don't want _us_ to know," he says.

"After they painted a giant warning on my front door," Derek replies.

"Then maybe it's something else!" Stiles cries, hands flying free of his hoodie and splaying out to either side. He's agitated, annoyed - Derek can smell it in every hitched, jagged movement. "Maybe it's something I don't know about. Jesus, I'm not all-knowing here. The internet can only tell you so much, and your dick of an uncle took all of his files with him when he split town."

It's not that Derek doesn't appreciate it - though he doesn't, not really, because his authority is being undermined by a fragile human kid with more bark than bite, and he's already treading on such unstable ground that he expects his Alpha powers to disappear any minute. He's got a headache; it's starting to coil in his temples, waiting to expand down into the base of his skull. Wearily, he pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

"Just," he starts, and struggles to find the rest of the rebuke he's looking for. "Just... I don't think it's the Alpha pack."

"Well, it's _something_ ," Stiles practically spits. He's mad now, so mad that Derek can taste that on the air, too. "And if you don't do something about it, then I will, because these are _kids_ , Derek. Kids are dying, and I want to know why so I can personally punch the son of a bitch responsible in the face."

There were kids dying a few feet away from where Stiles is standing now, too, and Derek can't mention that without the overload of panic and helplessness setting in.

"Don't, Stiles," Derek warns. "Don't do anything stupid."

"That's it?" Stiles shoots back. His hands are in his pockets again, and there's something else there, something heavy. Something Derek can't identify. There are angry lines on Stiles' face extending from the corners of his mouth. "No follow-up? No 'stupid like usual, Stiles?' You're losing your touch."

"I'm telling you not to get yourself killed."

Stiles snorts, a distinctly unhappy sound. Derek can't tell if the boy's frustrations are aimed at him or at the situation itself.

"Tell it to someone who cares," he says, and turns, walking away towards his Jeep parked at an obnoxious angle in the front yard. "I'm not one of your Betas."

If Stiles never knows how much it hurts to hear, how it feels like a blow to the stomach - how, when a Beta rejects the bond, gives up the offered gift, it feels like a knife ripping through sinewy muscle - then he is better off for it. It's only because he's walking away without so much as a look back over his shoulder that Derek can crumple against the side of the house, breathing hard. He doesn't watch Stiles get in the Jeep and leave; he can't. He can't see, because the Pack is howling around him and his own instincts are rising up to join it. The edges and colors that have made up his world are ripping away, bit by bit and inch by inch.

_That's four_ , his mind supplies, distantly. Derek feels like he's watching himself from afar as he takes a step and stumbles, palm pressed against the withered and warped boards that once made up his family's home. _One left._

Numbly, Derek knows that Isaac is already gone - he hasn't formally rejected the bond yet, but it's coming. He'll pledge himself to Scott, sever the cord, and then Derek will be back to where he started all over again, only with more holes in his life he won't be able to sew back up.

Derek should retract all of the Pack offers that have been thrown back in his face, but he can't quite bring himself to do so; he keeps them where they are, laying severed at his feet, because the small, fruitless bit of hope inside wants to believe they'll be picked up again. That his Alpha powers will come roaring back like a full-fledged Pack on the full moon. He presses his forehead against the boards of the house and breathes, in and out, so deep that it hurts.

It won't be the full moon for another week and a half, and Derek is thankful for it. Somewhere out there is a pack of Alphas waiting to pounce, and life has just served them Derek Hale on a silver platter.


	2. Chapter 2

She's back in the forest again.

She can smell the heady scent of the trees before she registers where she is; it's thick, like molasses, so tangible she thinks she could run her hand through it and feel the droplets congeal between her fingers. It makes it difficult to breathe, and when she sucks in a labored breath, she almost thinks that she can taste something on the air - something sweet, but sickly so, like fruit that's too ripe and leaking on the table.

Lydia feels oddly exposed, despite the thick grove of trees around her. She's vulnerable and they are watching her, and she's been here before, so she knows that running through the trees will only serve to get her lost - more lost than she already is. The healing scrapes on her forearms start to ache in rhythm with her footsteps as she steps forward. There has to be a way out. There is still sunlight - golden, sunset light, but sunlight nonetheless.

While it's light out, she feels brave. "Hello?" she calls. She can't hear the enemy around her. Whatever it is, whoever it is, it isn't here yet; she's alone, with the trees and the dancing streams of orange glow through the leaves.

As she walks, she tries to make sense of the pattern her feet are taking. She moves around the thick trunks of trees and thinks that she's seen it before. Bits of brush and weed look familiar. By the time she passes a fallen log, half-decayed and covered with a prickly green layer of moss, she knows she isn't moving in a straight line. She's curving around without meaning to, and still finding that the maze continues.

The sun is going down. She has precious few minutes left before they arrive in the shadow, waiting to pounce. Her heart quickens in her chest, a rapid _pat-pat-pat_ that thuds hard against her ribcage. She needs to wake up. She doesn't know how.

Goose bumps prickle over her arms, and she curls in on herself, hugging her arms closer to her stomach. She doesn't dare call out again, because now she knows they are there. She can hear them, feel them, wisps of things that shouldn't be there that are - she doesn't know where the sixth sense came from, but it's real and thrumming below her breastbone.

Lydia picks up her pace.

As the sun sets, they come out of the darkness: forms, intangible, nothing she can identify. It's worse that she can't see them, can't study them. She can't try and narrow down what they are, and she's too panicked now to really concentrate on the feelings. The panic isn't even all _hers_ , but she doesn't know where it came from. It feels like a secondary emotion set down on top of her own, out of place and misaligned, with edges that don't entirely match up; she can't push it away, just like she can't push away the branches that whip at her exposed skin as she runs beneath them.

One catches her on the cheek and pulls, a long gash up her face. She gives it no further thought, because the things behind her are gaining. She is the rabbit running terrified for her hole, and they are the wolves preparing to devour her whole.

Then she sees it - a path. It's faint and covered in damp, brown leaves, and she can barely register it as she moves over it, but it's a pathway. It's leading further into the trees, into the shadows, and she's too scared to take it. They might be there, waiting, just as they are behind her. They have her surrounded.

She stops, muscles spasming in terror too great to overcome, and throws her hands over her mouth. Behind her there is a snap of a twig, a crunch of dead weeds, and the awful, overpowering stench of decaying flesh.

When she wakes up, she's flung her alarm clock against the far wall and it's on the carpet in pieces.

"Damn," she mumbles, and presses her hands against her face in hopes of blocking out the real world calling outside her bedroom door.

\--

"I don't see why we have to be out here," Isaac says from the backseat.

"You don't have to be," Stiles replies, sharper than is necessary, knuckles white around the steering wheel. "In fact, I don't know who invited you."

"Scott," Isaac says mildly. Stiles glares at Scott in the passenger seat, who looks both hurt and apologetic at the same time - he doesn't quite understand that having Isaac as a permanent fixture lately has been really killing the Scott-n-Stiles bro time, and that his very existence is causing Stiles great emotional turmoil at the moment.

There's not really a way to relay that without sounding exceptionally clingy and needy - especially not with Isaac in the car with them - so Stiles just keeps his mouth shut and digs his teeth into his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. It's dark, and with his luck, it'll be something completely inane and normal that ends up taking him down, like hitting a wild animal with the Jeep.

"I really don't think breaking into the morgue is the best idea here," Scott continues, apparently picking up where Isaac left off like they shared thoughts. Stiles prickles; he and Scott used to share thoughts. They used to share _sleeping bags_ , although, granted, that was back when they were young and small and told scary stories by flashlight only to realize they scared themselves into insomnia afterwards.

"I don't think this stuff has been accidental," Stiles explains.

"You think these kids' parents killed them?" Scott asks. He sounds more surprised than horrified, which really just says a lot about the way their lives have gone.

In the rearview mirror, Stiles sees Isaac stiffen, gaze going to the window and the darkness beyond, and he feels a small twinge of regret. Sore subject.

"No," Stiles says. "I think something else did, and I think they just made it _look_ like accidents. Nothing in this town is an accident anymore."

Scott doesn't argue with that, and neither does Isaac, and Stiles is glad - he needs to concentrate on exactly how they are going to break into the morgue and then, afterwards, how he's going to live with himself after examining the body of a dead 4-year-old.

There are a few minutes of awkward quiet.

"Jesus," Stiles says, and reaches forward to switch on the radio - even the Top 40 hits would be better than the strange tension that has settled between them all, and that's when Isaac's hand is on his shoulder, squeezing so hard that Stiles nearly drives the Jeep off the road.

"Stop," Isaac commands.

"Shit!" Stiles cries, jerking the wheel to one side. His heart is in his throat, and he's nearly choking on it; he thinks maybe there's something in the road, another _kid_ , another accident waiting to happen with his own name written on it. But there's nothing but darkness and the reflective solid line in front of them. When Stiles feels composed enough to respond, he turns in his seat, smacking Isaac's shoulder roughly. "What the fuck, dude?"

Isaac doesn't say anything - he just points, out the window, to something that Stiles can't possibly see without super werewolf powers. "There's someone there."

"It's a _cemetery_ ," Stiles says, and then realizes what he just said. "Oh, shit. It's a cemetery at night. God, how is this my life?"

Isaac is already climbing out of the car, and Scott is following him, the _traitor_ , leaving Stiles with no choice but to follow them both. It's cool when the night air hits his skin, although it's possible that it's just his own self-preservation instincts trying to get him back in the car. He doesn't want to be in a graveyard at night - he really doesn't want to be in a graveyard at night in a town where supernatural things regularly threaten his existence.

He jogs a bit to catch up with the other two - Isaac has crossed half the stones and then stopped, at one that looks relatively new, still shiny and pristine and just carved. The whole thing makes Stiles' heart sink down to his stomach, churning.

"Oh, god," he says, before he's even reached the area where the other two have stopped to stare, and then, once he sees the scene, he repeats it with more force, "Oh, _god_."

It's the kid, the first one, the one who had an accident in the kitchen - the coffin has been dug up and opened, haphazardly, like the culprits didn't even care about being caught. If the body was just _gone_ , that would be one thing, but it's still there - or, parts of it are still there. Apparently just the parts they didn't want. Stiles gets a quick look at what appears to be intestines and torn flesh, and then shoves a hand over his mouth to fight his gag reflex.

"Not here," Isaac says, spinning quickly on his heel and shoving Stiles away. "It's a crime scene, puke somewhere else."

Stiles tries to concentrate on wondering how he can be so calm when faced when something so horrific, and at least the thought gets him to the edge of the woods. He falls, catching himself with his hands, and retches into the leaves there - he can feel something that feels an awful lot like a thorn digging into the pad of his palm. Then he rocks back on his heels, pressing the heel of his hands against his eyes and wishing it would dislodge the image that will forever be etched into his memory.

This is what his life has become - stumbling upon desecrated corpses in the night.

"What do you think it is?" Scott asks, quietly, almost too quietly for Stiles to pick out.

Stiles swallows the rest of the bile back down and climbs shakily to his feet. "It doesn't seem like a werewolf," he says.

"Maybe the Alphas are trying to give some kind of sign," Isaac suggests. His face is oddly open when Stiles manages to teeter his way back to them, still standing around the coffin like loitering around such a grisly scene _isn't_ the worst thing they could be doing. Isaac frowns, and then leans forward, with his finger outstretched, as if he's going to touch the remains. "Look at the way it was cut-"

" _Isaac_ ," Stiles snaps, and grabs for the other boy's hand. "Jesus."

Scott is looking a little green around the edges; maybe being a werewolf gives them more of an iron constitution. "He's right. It wasn't... it wasn't done with teeth."

"I cannot believe we are having this conversation," Stiles says. His stomach cramps again, causing him to double over - he wills himself not to be sick again. He tries not to look at the bits of the body hanging down over the side, but it's hard. It's like a train wreck, and he can't quite pull his gaze away. It's the most horrific thing he's seen, and his last year has been _filled_ with the stuff of nightmares. "I cannot believe we are even still _standing_ here, come on. We have to get out of here before my dad shows up. There's no way we can explain this one."

At least the other two don't fight him. They drive in silence and Stiles takes a right instead of a left; he's not up for a visit to the morgue tonight. Besides, they probably don't need it. It's pretty obvious now that the so-called "accidents" aren't really accidental at all. Isaac climbs out of the truck at his foster parents' house, people that Stiles doesn't know and he doesn't think Isaac really does, either.

When it's just him and Scott, Stiles allows his chest to unclench a bit.

"Don't," Scott says.

"Don't what?"

"Your heart," Scott replies, like it's some kind of answer.

Stiles smacks his hands against the steering wheel, irritated and rattled and desperately terrified, like piss his pants terrified. "You know, not all of us have werewolf super senses, okay? I don't know what it means when you say these things, so you need to explain to me like I'm a _normal_ person, which, as you may have forgotten, _I am._ "

Scott looks back over at him, his expression concerned. "You're going to have a panic attack," he says, simply, and Stiles' muscles recoil all at once. _Of course_ he is. "So, don't think about it while driving. I need you to get back home first."

"This is so creepy," Stiles says - the truth is, he's glad to have Scott's creepiness to focus on, because it's something other than death and a ritualistic disembowelment of a child, and _Christ_ , there's the panic, rising in his throat like bitter ash. "God, this is beyond creepy."

"Are you going to be okay?" Scott asks, when Stiles has pulled into his driveway and Scott has already climbed out the passenger side door. His fingers curled around the window frame, are starting to elongate. His claws are going to ruin the interior.

_No,_ Stiles wants to reply.

"Sure," he says instead. He knows Scott can hear the lie, and he doesn't care. His knuckles are white from his grip on the wheel. "Sure, I'm fine. You know me. I'm always fine."

"Stiles," Scott starts.

"I gotta go," Stiles interrupts. He doesn't want to hear it. "T minus a few minutes, right? So, I'd rather not run the Jeep into a median or something on my way back."

Scott reluctantly lets go of the door. "Text me when you get home."

"Sure," Stiles repeats, and puts the Jeep in reverse.

He makes it home, but just barely. He's lucky his dad is on-duty, because he spends an hour in the shower, under the ice-cold spray, with a sopping towel shoved into his mouth in an attempt to muffle his cries anyway, just in case there are werewolves skulking outside his yard. All he can see is the face of the dead child and the belly split open, insides strewn around the coffin, and the sinking, gut-wrenching knowledge that it could very well have been someone he knew instead.

\--

Isaac shows up after school the next day, and Derek doesn't register his presence until the boy is almost at the door.

"What is it?" Derek asks, tired, running a hand through his hair; he almost can't bear to look at Isaac. It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for someone to come back to his house with a flaming cocktail and launch it at the remains just to watch the structure burn to the foundation. It's over-kill, it's salt in the wounds - it's his penance, probably, for being such a horrible Pack leader.

"You need to get out more," Isaac says. He's got that frown again, the one that means there are things happening that Derek should know about and doesn't. "The grave of that kid, the first one? Somebody ripped it open and played Operation on the body."

Derek shakes his head. The subway depot is cold, colder than it should be. The Alphas never bothered to mark the station as a warning, even though they could have; the scent trail of the pack would have led them straight to it.

"Doesn't sound like wolves," Derek says.

"That's what I thought." There's a sharp trill of recognition, of pleasure, through the Pack bonds, and then it's gone just as quickly, like it was extinguished by a wave.

When Derek fails to answer in the way Isaac apparently wants, the boy shuffles back and forth between his feet. He looks anxious - he _feels_ anxious, though it's muted.

"So, what are we going to do?" he asks.

"I don't know," Derek admits. "I don't know what it is."

There's another spike of irritation, nervous energy that ripples the air between them. "Well, what are we going to do about Boyd and Erica? We have to find them."

"They don't want to be found," Derek tells him.

And Isaac doesn't fight it, because he knows just as well as Derek does that it's true. Erica and Boyd made their choice - Isaac can't feel the hole, the loss, the _absence_ like Derek can, but in the web, he recognizes that there are parts missing. The Pack is broken and in pieces, and Derek can smell Scott all over Isaac. Scott and Stiles, the scent of inevitable betrayal.

He wishes Isaac would just get it over with. The boy is still holding the other end of the bond, gingerly, with two fingers, and Derek wishes he would just drop it. Waiting for the bandage to be ripped off is torture.

"Stiles is looking into it," Isaac offers.

"Stiles isn't Pack."

Isaac's mouth thins. "He was, though, wasn't he?"

His presence isn't helping things.

"Go home, Isaac," Derek says. He's so tired. He hasn't had the strength to shift fully for weeks. Even the call of the moon and the sway of the trees hasn't been enough to entice him out. He's going to waste away below the ground, just like his family did, only with less fanfare and less smoking remains - fitting. He led the enemy to his own front door, and now he'll drive everyone he needs away.

"Derek," Isaac tries. He's still there. He's still _holding on._

"Go to Scott," Derek orders.

"Scott isn't my Alpha."

There's no mirth in the laugh that escapes Derek's throat, raw and painful and hoarse. "He might as well be," he says. He doesn't look up when Isaac leaves.

\--

The next time Lydia dreams of the woods, they catch her. It's just as terrible as she thought it would be; she can feel their claws at her sides, at her waist. They grapple for a firm grip on her flesh like they can pull her back into whatever abyss they came from, and she is writhing, flailing, trying to find something to hold onto. Her hands find a tree and her fingernails sink in, deep, cutting along the cuticles, and even as the pain flares through her forearms she keeps her grip. She screams and rails and tries to kick back, but they are incorporeal shadow-beings, and it doesn't do anything.

They are winning, they have her, and it's only her mother shaking her awake that snaps her from the reverie entirely. Her mother, with tears streaking her face and running her mascara, because Lydia is crouched on the floor and backed into a corner and kicking, kicking, throwing her arms out to stop what's happening.

Her nail beds are destroyed. Lydia thinks she sees splinters of the tree bark there when she looks down, almost unseeing, still confused and bleary and halfway in the dream world.

"Lydia," her mother cries. The dark kohl has run down to the corners of her lips and is mixing with the apricot of her lipstick. "Lydia, what's _happening_?"

What's happening is that she isn't safe in her dreams; whatever it is, whatever they are, it's carrying over into her waking world. Lydia isn't stupid enough to think that it'll get better. If anything, it's going to get worse. The last time she dreamt things and woke to them still being present, a dead man took up shelter in her head and used her body as his personal disgusting puppet.

"Nightmare," she says.

Her mother cries harder. She doesn't say what Lydia knows she wants to: _this isn't a nightmare, Lydia, you don't pull down pieces of your wallpaper because of bad dreams._

She may not be able to do this alone anymore.

\--

The secretary looks up when Lydia enters the office. She's wearing pearls, real pearls, and glasses with winged sides. She's so stereotypical that Lydia wants to scream, and then she feels guilty for channeling her frustration and aggression to people who don't deserve it.

"Can I help you?" the woman asks.

"No," Lydia says, honestly. "But you can make me an appointment with Ms. Morrell."

\--

"What do you think it is?"

Stiles pauses at the door. The odds are good that Derek already knows he's here - werewolf super smelling powers and all that, but when he gives it a few moments and the conversation continues, he thinks maybe Derek doesn't care. Stiles waits at the doorway and debates going in, and then thinks better of it. He skips across the mountain ash receptionist desk and flattens himself against the wall. He can still hear Derek and Deaton, in the operating room just beyond the door, slightly muffled.

"I don't know," Deaton says.

"But you don't think it's related to the Alphas."

Stiles can hear something, like a shuffle, like the drag of heels against the tiles of the floor. He tries to crane his head around, to see where they are, but thinks better of it halfway there and crouches back into his defensive position.

"I don't know," Deaton repeats, "but it doesn't look like it."

There's a guttural growl, and Derek says, "I can't fight this off."

"Not like this," Deaton agrees.

For a second, Stiles thinks that he's been discovered, but it's just a pause. He can still hear someone pacing - from the weight of the footsteps, it sounds like Derek. Stiles' breath catches in his throat.

"I don't know what to do," Derek says, voice very low. "This was never supposed to be me."

"Maybe not," Deaton replies, "but it is now. So what are you going to do about it?"

There's a slide, a grind of metal against tiles, and then the thud of a body sinking into a chair - Stiles can hear the bolts squeak as Derek's weight settles into it. "Nothing," Derek says.

"A healthy option," Deaton says.

"Fuck off," Derek hisses. "Aren't you supposed to be my guide? Telling me what to do? Or have you lost the Cliff's Notes version of this?"

Stiles tugs his knees into his chest. Everything about the scene he's listening to is jarring and wrong - out of place, edges misaligned. He's never heard Derek this way, never heard _Deaton_ this way, and the only thing that Stiles really, truly knows is the sound of a sloppy self-defense mechanism. Something has rattled both of them, so hard they are spitting at each other just to have a clear target to aim at, and Stiles is willing to bet it has to do with the half-mauled corpse the Sheriff's office "found" in the woods last night after an anonymous phone call.

"If you'll remember," Deaton says, and he sounds low and angry and _dangerous_ , and Stiles is gripped with the sudden realization that he's still not sure they should trust the man, "I was not the one to leave with the only records your family managed to put together."

"Don't talk about my family," Derek replies. The chair scrapes noisily against the floor; he must have stood up, because Stiles can hear his heels against the ground again. "You don't get to talk about them, because you couldn't protect them."

"Me?" Deaton says. There's a pause. "I wasn't the one who couldn't protect them, Derek."

Something slams - the sound of it is so sudden and loud that Stiles flinches and nearly cries out, slapping a hand over his mouth only because he doesn't think either of them know he's here. There's no way that Derek couldn't _know_ , couldn't _smell_ , but as the man in question stalks angrily out of the animal clinic slamming his fist into the wall on the way out, Stiles is reasonably sure of it.

It takes him awhile to get up again. He feels shaky and disoriented, vaguely unhappy - something has settled in the pit of his stomach, and it's making his hands tremble.

Deaton looks surprised to see him; that much, at least, seems real.

"Stiles," he says, and then he nods, expression falling into something much more neutral. "How much did you hear?"

"Enough," Stiles replies. "How did Derek not know I was here?"

Deaton is shaking his head. He's bent over the operating table, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. "I shouldn't have pushed like that. It was wrong - it was like pouring salt in the wound and pressing down, and I know better. I'm sorry you had to witness that."

"Like I give a shit," Stiles says. He takes a step forward, hand outstretched. "I'm serious, now, how did Derek not smell me?"

"Derek's not operating at full power at present."

"What does that mean?" Stiles demands. "What does - that doesn't make any sense, he's an Alpha."

"An Alpha without a Pack," Deaton replies, sharp. His gaze flickers up to Stiles, and then back down to the table, where his fingers are splayed across the silver surface. He seems almost lost in his own thoughts, and if Stiles hadn't come here for information, for help, for a lead so he isn't searching the internet blindly at night hoping that his father doesn't think he's into some criminally horrifying fetishes, he'd leave the man alone.

Stiles swallows, trying not to remember the kid's mutilated body from the night before. "He didn't have a Pack when he became an Alpha, either, so what's the difference?"

"He hadn't made any yet then," Deaton says. He sighs, shaking his head again. "He's holding onto the Pack bonds and they are draining his strength day by day."

He raises his head, suddenly, almost like he's seeing Stiles for the first time. "But you didn't come here to talk about Derek," he says, and it's not a question.

"I came about the shit that's been going on here," Stiles tells him. "I need to know what it is, how to fight it. There's got to be something you know."

"It's not wolves," Deaton says. "It doesn't fit any sort of normal patterns. But without the information Peter Hale left with, I don't know what it is. It could be anything - another mutated creation, like the kanima was. Or something worse."

"Worse than Jackson having fangs and paralyzing drool?" Stiles tries, but the joke doesn't even make himself feel any better. He shuffles, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "What about the Alphas?"

"Erica and Boyd are gone."

Stiles sighs loudly, drawing the sound out. "Then what do you want us to do? People are _dying_. There has to be _something_ you know."

"Just... a legend," Deaton says, slowly. "It's probably nothing."

"You know, when people say shit like that, it usually ends up being _something_."

Deaton levels Stiles with an unreadable expression, face tight. "The Navajo call them Skin-walkers. They are... different than werewolves."

"Different like happier?" Stiles tries to swallow around the lump in his throat.

"It's not poison, like werewolf bites are," Deaton continues. "It's worse. It's chosen. It devours and deforms the soul."

There's a long second, and then another, and Stiles is acutely aware of his heart thundering in his chest. "Great," he mumbles. "Can't wait to meet 'em. Another banner week in Beacon Hills."


	3. Chapter 3

Three nights before the full moon, Derek goes to the remains of his house and stumbles down into the basement, past the scorch marks that have colored the wooden boards nearly black and the acrid, still-lingering scent of death - the scent that he can barely smell anymore. He isn't sure if it's because it has dissipated or because he can't even find his way through his own life; somewhere, things disappeared and fell apart, and even if he traces the line backwards to see where things began, he comes up short. There's no easy answer. The road winds back to Laura, standing tall in New York when she assumed the Alpha powers, to his parents side by side on the house porch watching the pack play in the yard.

He misses a step and stumbles, catching himself on the rail, as the wave of guilt and regret slams into him harder than it has in awhile. He's been okay, since Kate Argent. He was doing alright, living, breathing, and trying to forge a new life from the ashes of his old one. Only now, his life has burned down for a second time, and he doesn't think he has the strength to pick it back up again.

In the basement, in the cellar that is cool because the windows were blown out in the police force's haste to find the bodies buried within, Derek crouches on the ground. He places his palms in the dirt - he never allowed himself to do this. When he lived here, waiting for Peter to show his face, trying to train Scott, he cut this part of himself out. He had to deal, and he couldn't do that when faced with everything the house had buried.

Now, there is no buffer.

Derek thinks of them suffocating. He thinks of the way they would have screamed, the way they would claw at their throats - and then the burning would have started, charring flesh faster than it could regenerate.

Derek sinks his claws into the ground and heaves away a chunk of wall, of congealed mud and dirt, and hurls it at the far corner. Then he tries to fall into himself completely, to give up, to give in to the shift that is only a few nights away -

\- and there is nothing. No shift.

He reaches in further. He can't feel his wolf; he can't feel anything but the granules of despair digging into the pads of his palms. There has only been one time that he's failed to shift when he wanted to, and it was in the burning wreckage of the aftermath he's surrounded by.

He can't make the change. His entire body is trembling with exertion, with frustration, with abject humiliation; this is how much he has failed. Derek has lost so much that the very essence of his being is denied to him. He can't call himself an Alpha, because his pack has deserted the bonds that held them together. And he's not an Omega, because he's still got the Alpha powers, burning somewhere in a place he can't get to anymore.

There is nothing - only the smell of mold and decay that has seeped into every pore of the house's frame.

He doesn't know how long he stays there. The truth is that there's nowhere else for him to go.

\--

There's nothing on Ms. Morell's face to give away what she's thinking, but Lydia still feels like she's being scrutinized. She wonders if the counselor thinks she's crazy - other people certainly do. It's only by avoiding the train of thought completely that Lydia can avoid making the same judgment about herself that the others do.

She sits in the uncomfortable chair, staring out the window and trying to pretend like she hadn't been the one to request the session.

"Ms. Martin," Ms. Morell starts.

"Lydia is fine," Lydia tells her, without turning.

"Lydia," Ms. Morell amends, and her voice is softer somewhere. Lydia lets her gaze flicker over to the woman's desk, to the papers stacked there - her files, she's sure. She knows what they have to say: outbursts in class, hysterical episodes. Trauma on the pitch. Hospitalization for a week. Unexplained disappearance to the woods.

Lydia doesn't like that a handful of old papers are what people know about her life. She is more than the glaring words on the pages.

"You obviously wanted to talk about something," the woman prompts. She doesn't _sound_ like she's asking for anything, but Lydia still feels backed into a corner. This is stupid. She shouldn't have come here, and yet she can't get herself to leave. "Why don't you start with what's going on in your life right now?"

"My boyfriend left town," Lydia blurts, without meaning to. She feels even worse afterwards, like this is all because of _Jackson_ , like she's that kind of girl.

Ms. Morell just sort of nods. Maybe she'd been expecting that. "His father was relocated out of Beacon Hills. And you miss him?"

"Of course I do," Lydia says. "But he wasn't - he wasn't my boyfriend. At the end, we weren't dating any longer."

"That doesn't mean the feelings weren't still there."

Lydia has enough to level a glare across the table; the counselor is perceptive, but not in the right places. "I didn't come here to talk about my romantic problems."

"Then what did you come to talk about?" Ms. Morell asks.

"Last year, Allison had you translate something," Lydia says. "In Latin."

"Archaic Latin," Ms. Morell says, and nods. "I remember."

Lydia doesn't bother to tell the woman that she did it _wrong_ \- it's not really the point. "There aren't very many people who can read Archaic Latin."

"And you want to talk about how I learned it?" the woman guesses.

"No," Lydia says. She shakes her head, turning her gaze back to the window. There's a bug caught in the screen - its wings are torn and stuck, and it can't move. She wonders how it must feel, to be caught somewhere, knowing that the end is approaching and having no way to bring it on faster. "I want to know why."

Ms. Morell seems confused by the question. When Lydia shifts her gaze across the desk, across the woman's hands folded demurely on top of the file folder, there are a hundred questions on the counselor's face.

"I learned it a long time ago," she says, slowly, almost like she's unsure if she wants to divulge the information. "From... a teacher. Someone very influential to me."

"I think," Lydia tells her, "that it's just _one_ of the things you know that you don't tell other people about."

Ms. Morell leans forward, a bit of hair falling from her shoulder. "And what do _you_ know that you don't tell other people about, Lydia?"

"I know about the werewolves in Beacon Hills," Lydia says. She isn't surprised when Ms. Morell doesn't look shocked - she suspected that much. People who can read Archaic Latin aren't usually installed as counselors and French teachers at small schools like Beacon Hills. "I know that there are things you can do to a person that are worse than killing them. And I know things that I shouldn't know, things that I can't identify but are in my head anyway."

"Do you see things?"

Lydia drops her eyes down to her nails. The paint is chipping on her pinky.

"I don't know," she answers honestly. She's come this far; it almost feels good to get it off her chest. She's not the only one with the secret anymore. "I've been dreaming a lot."

"Why don't you tell me what's happening in these dreams?" Ms. Morell suggests.

"You're going to think I'm crazy," Lydia laughs. "Everyone else does. No one pays attention to me when I need it, and everyone watches when I wish they wouldn't. Where was everyone last year, when I was trapped inside my own head?"

Ms. Morell's eyes are maddeningly gentle. "Maybe they were here, and you just didn't know it."

"Bullshit," Lydia spits.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because no one was here," Lydia says, and in her lap, her hands squeeze into fists, nails digging into her palms. "No one listened. No one cared to _tell me_ about these things. And now I can't get away when it's the only thing I want to do."

There's something on the other woman's face - it's not pity. It's more like understanding, like kinship, and Lydia can't explain it.

"What are you dreaming about?" Ms. Morell prompts.

Lydia sucks in a low, deep breath that's almost painful. "A forest. I'm in a forest."

\--

For the first time in a long time, Stiles wishes he wasn't the one in charge of research. Usually, he likes to be on top of things - he likes to know what is going on, and what needs to happen. He likes having an element of control in his hands, in a life that has spun wildly off its axis lately; he likes being useful, being valued.

He doesn't like sitting in his bedroom, eyes glued to the screen, convinced that every single noise outside his window was a monster sent to devour him whole. He doesn't like finding information on the demon they are hunting and it _rattling_ him, shaking him so badly that he doesn't know up from down. He can't turn his light on - his father is home, sleeping, and Stiles doesn't want to chance it. He can't explain that he's terrified because he just pulled up two hours' worth of information on the internet of things that _eat_ corpses, of things that _feast_ on the bodies of the dead and desecrate them in rituals.

Even after he has closed the Chrome window, after he's tried to forget what he just read and the images he just saw, he can't. He sits in bed and is afraid to lie down; it's a terrible position to be in defensively, slow to rise and react.

He spends most of the night with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling - at the patterns created by the moonlight streaming inside. He thinks of the dead children and the fact that somewhere in the woods, half-dead, cursed creatures are eating their entrails after roasting them over a fire. He thinks of the children's parents, of what it would do to them if they knew.

He thinks of what it would do to his own father - how mad it would drive him, how far down into the bottle.

As the morning light breaks over the horizon and Stiles finally, _finally_ feels a tingle of warmth again, he knows that the only thing that can combat the horror in Beacon Hills is the pack: the broken, splintered, fractured pack, and the miserable Alpha in charge of it.

\--

"There are many schools of thought within spirituality that believe in the ability to commune with beings on the other side of reality," Ms. Morell says, as Lydia settles back against the couch's arm and folds her fingers together over her stomach. "It's native to many religious systems, and practiced both historically and currently."

The woman presses three fingers against Lydia's temple; her fingertips are cool.

"What does all of that mean other than a belief in the absurd?" Lydia asks.

"It means that I am going to put you to sleep, through hypnosis," Ms. Morell replies, "and that you are going to walk me through this forest and tell me what's happening."

Lydia sighs. "This should be simple, then. I haven't been sleeping well."

"I don't doubt it."

"What do you think this is?" Lydia asks, and then, as an almost fearful afterthought that churns in her stomach, making her feel as weak as she did that day on the lacrosse pitch, adds, "Is there something wrong with me?"

"Those given charge of these rituals were thought of as healers," Ms. Morell says. There's nothing in her tone to betray what she's thinking. "If anything, your abilities make you special."

"I don't feel special," Lydia whispers. She closes her eyes because the prick of hot tears is stinging the corners of her eyes, and she refuses to let herself cry in the guidance counselor's office.

Ms. Morell's fingers are still there, warm and steady against the side of Lydia's head. "You've been chosen."

Lydia thinks of teeth sinking into her flesh, of the bite of something sharp and cold in her bloodstream that quickly turned her entire world black. If that was being chosen, then Lydia would rather have blended with the others - she'd rather have been another shade of gray in a wash of colorless faces, people without determination and drive, without dreams or passion.

Her fingers, lying across her abdomen, fiddle with the silver ring on her left index finger, twisting it 'round and 'round her digit. "This isn't an honor, it's a curse."

"In many cultures, people with this level of ability were considered shamans. They were held in esteem by the rest of the group. They were given leadership status."

"I have enough trouble," Lydia says. "I'm in high school."

"And you need to let that all fall away," Ms. Morell tells her. She sits back, heels squeaking against the linoleum tiles. "Listen to the sound of my voice, and try not to concentrate on anything. Clear your mind. And when I tell you to begin, I want you to count backwards from 100."

When she was in sixth grade, she attended a sleepover where all the girls played silly mind games well after midnight, like _light as a feather, stiff as a board_. Lydia remembers being the only one who found the entire thing silly and juvenile. 

"That won't work," she replies. "I need something more challenging."

"Alright," Ms. Morell says. Lydia's eyes are still closed, but she thinks she can hear a smile there, within the tone. "Then list me all the prime numbers, starting at the bottom."

\--

Scott shows up a few days later, outside the Hale house. Derek hasn't yet bothered to leave. Scott appears wild-eyed and out of breath, a flush to his cheeks that has clearly held over from shifting; his claws aren't yet retracted, and he doesn't seem to notice that he's digging them into his own hands.

"Derek!" he calls, hoarse and panicked. Derek can only barely smell it, on the air around him - terror, laced with anger and revulsion, the sort of reaction that is instinctual and animalistic, possible only from a gut-reaction to an unwanted scent. "Derek! Come out here, I need you!"

Derek complies, but only because he knows that Scott won't go away if he doesn't.

"There's something in the woods," Scott says, spreading his arms wide to either side. "There's something there, and it smells _awful_ , like it's rotting."

Derek knows - he's smelled something, too, but has been unable to identify it and unwilling to venture out into the trees. The closeted cellar of the house has become his refuge and his prison, at the same time.

When he fails to respond as quickly as Scott would like, the boy's face darkens. It's rare to see a true scowl there, but it appears, tight and damning. Another facet of how badly Derek has failed, that this barely-in-control boy has been largely untaught, left to his own devices and the advice of a hyperactive friend. If Scott were pack, he'd be integrated immediately, slotted into the hierarchy.

But Derek doesn't have a pack, and even if he did, Scott wouldn't be in it; the boy has made that abundantly clear.

"If you don't come with me to take care of this," Scott starts, claws extending again, "I will personally hunt you down. There's something here that is not right, and it's _hurting_ people, it's hurting _kids_."

The worst part is, at this point, he probably could.

"Fine," Derek says. There's no other response. "Where did you last smell it?"

Scott leads him past the river, past the winding shoreline that is littered with rocks and overgrown bits of weed; this is a place that Derek used to know by heart. When his family had been alive, this has been their hunting ground and their sanctuary. His father used to take them around the neck of the river, where it bottlenecked, and separate the pack - they would find prey, a rabbit, a deer, and they would reach out through the pack web that connected them to coordinate their movements. Out of the weeds, the frightened animal would run, racing across the grass like the devil itself was on its heels, and Derek would follow feeling as if there were no freer feeling in the world, no truer way to live.

The waters of the river have sunk down, until the mud is crawling up to the eroding, downward sloping line of the forest's edge. As they run, chasing whatever it is that riled Scott into his half-shifted form, Derek's hands and feet sink down into it. He feels the slimy _realness_ between his fingers, splattering the front of his shift and the exposed skin of his face. He's so caught up in his own memories, the thoughts and images bound to this place, this feeling, that he very nearly misses the scent Scott was talking about until it smacks right into him. It's so _putrid_ , so awful, such a violation of the nature that it shocks Derek back into his completely human form - he fails to realize that it was the most complete shift (and even at that, a laughingly weak result) that he's managed to do for days.

He rocks back on his heels, raising a hand to his mouth.

"I told you," Scott says, unnecessarily; Derek couldn't have avoided it if he'd been trying. The other boy looks around uneasily, biting his lower lip, until he finally turns to Derek again. "What do you think it is?"

It's too fresh; it's too _close_. Scott has walked them straight into the heart of the enemy's territory, and now Derek's instincts are so muddled and upset by the smell that he can't discern the way out. There are traces of the creatures everywhere: on the bark of the trees, on the water that's lapping against the rocks. They have not only lingered, they have _nested_.

"Scott," Derek says, and that's all the further he gets before one of them leaps from the brush at the side of the forest with a bone-chilling cry.

\--

The next time Lydia is aware of where she is, there are trees around her. She's back in the forest, and this time it's light - somewhere in the sky, in the expanse that she can't see but knows is there, the sun is hanging on despite the pull of darkness.

Lydia spins, a full 360 degrees, and sees nothing but splashes of green and brown. Trees stretch out as far as she can see in every direction, unmoving.

Something tugs at her mind, at the corner - something she is supposed to remember. There's a voice in her head that tells her to start moving. She knows there is nothing gained by standing still. She begins to walk.

"Take care to notice what you see," says the small voice in her ears, the voice that doesn't sound like her. For a second, Lydia is terrified, heart freezing in her chest; the last time she heard a voice in her thoughts that wasn't her own, it was Peter Hale trying to mark and claim her as his own. But this voice doesn't feel malicious. It's oddly therapeutic, calming.

"All I see are trees," Lydia replies, cross.

She keeps moving anyway. The last time she was here, she was running, and it was dark, but she remembers a path. There was something under the dead, pooling leaves on the ground - a trail to let her feet pick out without thought. When she concentrates, she loses it, and the entire thing slides into a blurry, indiscernible mess, but when she lifts her gaze and trains her thoughts to focus on nothing, she finds it again. She navigates it based on the twinge of recognition in her chest. It feels right, and so she keeps walking; her feet know the way to go, even if her mind doesn't.

It takes her awhile to continue, and the sun stays up. She realizes that she is slowly curving inwards - her path is not straight. It dips within the trees, sharper and sharper, until Lydia can trace the design of it. It's a spiral. The forest's path is a spiral within and around the trees, and she's walking into it.

She stops. "What do I do?" she asks, believing blindly that she'll receive a response.

"Keep going,"' the voice says.

"Spirals have a center," Lydia tells it. "I don't know what's going to be there, but this forest is full of things trying to _kill_ me."

There is nothing for a long moment, and then, like a wave sweeping over her and causing all her hairs to stand on end, "If you always run from things you are afraid of, you won't ever find where the path leads."

"This doesn't make sense," Lydia says, plaintively. Her memory is very fuzzy; there is something her mind wants to remember, and can't. She doesn't know what she was doing before she came here, but she knows this place and recalls being in it before. She wonders if she's been plucked from something that might have been meaningful, but carries no weight here - this place is set apart from everything else. It feels strange: different.

"It will," the voice assures her, "if you follow this through to completion."

There isn't any other choice, anyway. Lydia is in the forest whether she likes it or not - she should make good on the time allowed with the sun still overhead, when the haunts are kept at bay. She continues walking as the spiraling path gets thinner and thinner, loops tighter and tighter.

She is both afraid and eager to see what is at the center of it all.

It either takes her forever or a second to reach it - she isn't sure. All she knows is that her feet are touching the middle, the apex, the part she wished to reach and the section that the demons were trying to keep her from. For a moment, it doesn't feel any different from the rest of the forest.

"There's nothing here," she starts. There's something on the back of her neck - not quite a whisper, not quite a breath. She turns and finds nothing. "There's nothing-"

In the distance, there is a howl. She should feel afraid - after all, she's trapped in the woods with creatures that come from nightmares. But the howl isn't them; she knows that. She can feel it straight down to her toes, reverberating through her bones. It's a friend. It's _important._ There is a scent of cinnamon, of spices, something warm - something that instinctively causes her to take a step forward to seek more of it out.

Overhead, the sun as fallen completely. It's dark.

"I think," Lydia starts, and licks her lips. "I think I want to follow it."

"What is it?" the voice asks. "Can you see?"

She can't see anything, because the light is gone. Behind her, there is a snap and pop of twigs, crushed beneath the heel of something.

"This doesn't make sense," Lydia says. She's babbling - the fear is back. She knows they are there, and they have targeted her, and she's at their mercy now. Whatever friend is out there, whatever _part_ of her she can hear, it's too far to help. She wants to follow, and she'll never get there in time. "I shouldn't be following noises like that, it's an _animal_."

"Are they back?" the voice asks. It's insistent. Lydia doesn't even hear it at first over the hammering of her own heartbeat, and it repeats, louder, stronger, "Lydia, are they there?"

"Yes," Lydia whispers. If she turns, she will see them. She'll come face to face. She is frozen to the spot, rooted to the ground. She wants to spread her arms wide and sink deep into the mud like the trees, to branch out and cover herself in a protective coat of leaves. She swallows and the action catches midway in her throat.

"I think they're-"

\--

Whatever it is, it's fast. It comes hurtling out of the trees too fast to dodge, moving with inhuman, unholy speed. Scott throws himself out of the way and hits the mud, the rocks at the side of the river, and Derek isn't so lucky; he can't get his legs to respond that quickly. He can't seem to move fast enough to avoid it, and the thing hits him so hard it knocks the wind from his lungs.

That didn't used to be possible.

He rolls, doing the only thing he can think of to dislodge whatever it is that is atop him. It's a flurry of activity, shrieks that sound like a bird of prey being strangled, and claws that are ripping into his shoulders so deep he can feel the warm spray of his own blood. He rolls again, smacking one of the wounds on an upturned root too close to the water's edge, and it's at least enough to get the razor-sharp nails out of his flesh.

Scott growls, shifted, and launches at the creature from behind. Derek gets only a quick look at its face: darkness and shadows. It's distorted to the point that he can't make out features. Maybe it was human at one point, maybe not.

"Scott," he chokes. He can't shift - whatever he had, whatever anchor he'd found, he's _lost_ it. He's back in the basement of his parents' home, no better than he'd been bent over the charred dirt. He can move though, so he does. He pulls himself up by the root he'd deepened one of the claw slashes on, straining to drag his legs up with him.

Behind him, over his shoulder, Scott and the creature are fighting. Now that it's so close, Derek's senses are completely overloaded with the disgusting smell. He can pick out the bits that are rotting, the parts that have gone bad - it's enough of a human that Derek can identify the awful, acrid stench of decay there, mixed in with other things. If he could shift, if he could sink all of his pain and misery into it, he isn't even sure what would happen. He's half-certain that it would pop like an overripe fruit hurled against a wall.

Scott growls again, more howl than anything else, feral and wild. He's holding his own, but he should be doing more than that - he's a wolf. He's a wolf who is relatively in-control of his own shifting, of the dual natures he's now burdened with, and he's only managing to keep the thing from tearing him apart like it already did Derek.

Derek presses a hand to his shoulder, and it comes away red. He hasn't healed yet.

"The river," he chokes out, and hopes that the other boy can hear him. There isn't much over the rage-filled din, the creature's bone-chilling screams and Scott's increasingly agitated noises. "Scott, the river."

He isn't sure it will work, but he remembers what his father used to tell him about the water. This was their territory. The water was part of the land, a cleansing aspect; the water kept them all alive, kept the plants tall and green. When the waves would rush over the collection of rocks, he used to feel something. Laura had joked that it was the same as the pulse pounding through their blood, the rise and fall of the water's edge.

It might work now - whatever this thing is, it's a blight on the land, and every nerve of the forest is screaming for it to be gone.

Derek stumbles to his feet. Scott is starting to tire against an enemy that moves too fast to pin down. They can't fight it; maybe Derek could at full-strength, but not like this. Not this empty shell. He's no better than his damn house anymore, and he's suddenly overwhelmingly _furious_ at it.

He lunges, hands first, hands that miraculously have _claws_ again, and luck is on his side, because he catches the creature as it's caught mid-leap, aiming for Scott's face. The force of his motion sends it careening backwards into the water, and it hits with a splash and a shriek of fury.

"What-" Scott starts, words mumbled and nearly incoherent around the canines extending from his gums.

Derek just points. "Look."

The creature - even now, he can't really see, can't seem to pick out features - is wailing in agony as it splashes futilely in the water, struggling against something that Derek can't pick out. It goes under far quicker than he'd imagined. One second it's there, mouth opened into an angry 'o' shape, and the next it's simply gone, disappeared beneath the surface and already blurred from sight.

Derek breathes in once, twice, wondering why it _hurts_ , and then crumples. The gashes on his shoulders and arms are throbbing. It's like wolfsbane was laced there, pressed beneath the surface so the skin can't heal over it.

"Shit," Scott says. He kneels down, and his hands are pressing in all the wrong places, only making the whole thing worse. "Holy shit, Derek, what _was_ that thing?"

"I don't know," Derek gasps.

"Oh, _god_ ," Scott moans. His palm finds one of the bleeding cuts, the tear in skin that feels like it was carved with a serrated knife. "You're - oh _god_ , you're bleeding _everywhere._ Why aren't you healing?"

Derek shakes his head; it takes too much energy to answer.

"Is this wolfsbane? Did that thing have some?"

Around him, the trees are moving, branches waving in the air - it's an elegy. It's the sad, mournful song for something that is already passing. Derek can feel the edge to the air that contains his own name. It murmurs against his ear, light as a tender caress. The ground beneath him begins to wave and coil. He's losing his ability to stay upright, even on his knees, propping himself up with his arms.

"Derek," Scott is saying, and he sounds very far away. "Derek, holy shit, stay with me. Oh my god, don't you dare die."

Derek wonders if the trees sang a requiem for his family when they burned. They were consumed by a fire the like that would ravage the forest and leave it dry and bereft of green - surely there was a song for them, too, sung through the tree cover and the water that's rippling softly beyond his reach.

"Do you hear me, Derek?" Scott says. He's starting to fade out. "Don't you dare die on me, don't you-"

And then there is nothing but the warm, sweet smell of the leaves that have already fallen, pressed close against Derek's cheek in the softest pillow he's ever known.


	4. Chapter 4

Ms. Morell pushes a cup of hot tea into Lydia's shaking hands before she takes her place on the plastic-coated, Beacon Hills-issue chair across from the couch.

"It sounded like it got intense there at the end," she says. She's not exactly gentle - she isn't _harsh_ , either. It's more like the absence of anything. Lydia appreciates it. The last thing she wants right now is someone treating her like some kind of fragile vase that should be kept up on a shelf and looked at, for fear of smudging with fingerprints. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"I don't remember," Lydia tells her.

"I'm not going to judge you - I'm here to help."

Lydia shakes her head. She takes a sip of the tea only to have something to do, and finds the jasmine taste to it soothing. "No, I mean, I don't know what happened. There was something behind me, and I knew it was there, but that's the last thing I can recall from it. I just... woke up. Everything stopped."

Ms. Morell doesn't answer right away.

"I know how hypnosis works," Lydia says, agitated and bristling. Even though there is no one else in the room, she feels like there are eyes on her, watching her. "I know what it's supposed to do. I know where psychological disorders stem from and what drugs are necessary to regulate the brain's chemicals."

The counselor studies her for a long minute, and then tilts her head to one side. "Are you afraid of asking for help?"

"I came here, didn't I?" Lydia counters.

"It's not the same as taking the offered life jacket."

"I'm not drowning," Lydia argues, but it feels an awful lot like she is. Breathing is like sucking in lungfuls of something hot and sticky, something that coats the inside of her ribcage and turns everything slow.

She hadn't noticed that Ms. Morell poured a cup of tea for herself until the woman takes a drink of it. There's a poignant silence; Lydia is supposed to be talking. The lull in the conversation is her own, a pause to fill with words. She knows how counseling sessions work, too.

"I don't want to go to them for help," she admits. Her fingers curl tighter around the mug. "I don't want anything to do with them, or this. I just wanted this all to go away."

"Running from things we don't like usually just prolongs it," Ms. Morell says.

Lydia snorts. "I tried running from this. I didn't run fast enough. Instead, I ended up in the hospital for a week under blood transfusions."

The counselor sets her mug down. Her fingernails are painted a very pale pink - O.P.I.'s _Malaysian Mint_. "If you aren't running, then what are you doing?"

"Nothing," Lydia says, and shakes her head. "I'm doing nothing."

"Would you rather be doing something?"

Her whole life, Lydia has seen the ways that things connect. She can trace a process from beginning to end, the final calculation and the initial equation; waves and cosines were her bedtime stories when other girls her age were reading about princesses in far off castles. She's never been faced with a problem she couldn't solve like this - she's never been so in the dark, holding so many unknown variables.

Instead of throwing herself into identifying the factors here, she has pushed the entire thing away in hopes that it would disappear. She can't remember the last time she did that.

She sighs. She doesn't want anymore of her tea. "Yes," she says. "Yes, I'd rather be doing something."

"Good," Ms. Morell replies. "To be honest, I don't know what's coming. But I don't really think that you have much of a choice."

\--

"What happened?" Stiles asks, as he stumbles into the vet's office and promptly smacks his shin against the wooden counter door. "Scott texted me, said-"

"Derek's alive," Deaton tells him.

That stops Stiles cold, his heart sinking down into his stomach. "Was this ever _not_ a given?" he says, and it comes out slightly squeakier than he would have liked.

Behind the counter, Scott's standing against the wall with his arms crossed - there are tears in his shirt, like marks, like someone took scissors and just started slashing at the fabric. Stiles doesn't want to look too closely at them, for fear of what he'll really see there: a fight. There was a fight, there was something _awful_ , and it was bad enough that he was getting 911 texts on his phone.

A while ago, Stiles might have been happier about the idea of Derek nearly being killed. Now, it sits in his stomach like he ate a rock, and it festers there, sort of aching - he _really_ doesn't want Derek to die.

"Scott," he starts, because he's a little afraid to go into the back room, where Deaton presumably has Derek laying on the cold slab of metal.

"I don't know what happened," Scott says. He sounds small, afraid, the sort of Scott that Stiles hasn't seen since the bite. "I mean, I had smelled something wrong in the woods, so I went to get Derek to investigate-"

"You _smelled_ something wrong?" Stiles interrupts.

Scott shrugs. "I just knew something wasn't _right_. There was something there."

"Yeah, Skin-walkers," Stiles says, and when Scott looks at him with both eyebrows raised, disappearing in his hairline, Stiles adds, "Deaton had me research some things. I thought we had more time. I don't - I don't know _why_ , I thought that, but I did."

"They're here," Scott says, grim. "They almost killed Derek."

"I don't understand," Stiles shifts his gaze to Deaton, who has splashes of red across the front of his button-down shift that are completely unnerving. "Why isn't he healing?"

Deaton's mouth thins, tightening, the action pulling down the skin of his cheeks. He looks older; maybe it's the light, or maybe it's the splash of _crimson_ on his chest. "The Skin-walkers are mutated, corrupted shape shifters. Because of the things they have to do in order to get and keep their power-"

"Like?" Scott interjects.

"Eating dead babies," Stiles replies. "Among other things I'd rather not ever think about again."

"They devour everything they touch," Deaton continues. "Their very existence is so wrong that they begin to warp things around them. It's why Scott, you could smell that something was off - it is. Nature itself rejects the abominations they've become."

"I still don't get what this has to do with Derek not healing," Stiles says. "They stripped him off his wolfy power?"

This time, Deaton's expression is very hard. "No," he replies. "You did."

"What?" Stiles balks. "I - _what_?"

"You were pack," Deaton says, like it answers everything. He shakes his head, and Stiles can see his fingers flex against from their crossed positions on his arms. "He's an Alpha who has lost his pack, and with it, the majority of his abilities. At this point, it was easy for the Skin-walkers to fester in through what remained."

Stiles holds his hands up. "You are _not_ holding me responsible for this," he says. "This is not my fault. What about Erica and Boyd?!"

"They also contributed," Deaton agrees.

"And me?" Scott asks.

This question seems to surprise Deaton. "You weren't Derek's pack."

"Neither was I," Stiles insists. "Also, I'm not a _werewolf_ , so I don't even understand how this applies to me."

"That's not how packs work," Deaton tells him. The man leans against the wall and uncrosses his arms, bringing his hands out in front of him. "Being pack isn't just about being bitten; that's only part of it. The bond between an individual and the pack is a two-way cord. It has to be initiated and accepted at both ends."

"And being bitten," Stiles says, "that starts it."

Deaton nods. "From the Alpha, yes. But the Beta must accept the bond. Take Scott, for example. He never accepted Peter's bond. He was never Peter's pack."

"Okay, but see, again, back to this whole _I'm not a werewolf_ thing. I was never bitten, this doesn't make sense."

"Being bitten isn't the only way to initiate a bond," Deaton tells him, "only one of them. An Alpha can offer it to someone that they didn't themselves bite."

Stiles rocks back on his heels, because something has clicked into place. "Oh," he says, slowly, drawing out the syllable between his teeth. "Like, when Derek wanted Scott to be in his pack."

"But I never accepted," Scott says - he sounds quiet again. Guilty, maybe, if Stiles had to put a word to it.

"Um, and I fail to see how I was ever a part of this," Stiles adds.

"Derek offered the bond to you the same time he did Scott," Deaton says. He looks so calm, like all of this makes sense and isn't _lunacy_.

"You said it had to go both ways," Stiles tries. "I still didn't _accept_ this."

Deaton settles another weighty, unreadable gaze on him. It sort of makes Stiles want to shrink back, to go out the way he came in. "At some point," the man says, very quietly, "you did."

Stiles thinks about the kanima, and Lydia, the way Derek wanted to go after both with the perhaps ruthless idea that his decision was the right one, and inexplicably, he thinks of the main light of his phone bright, icons lit, and then tossing it into the chlorinated water as he dove down beneath the surface.

"Shit," he mumbles. He rubs a hand wearily over his face. "The pool. The night in the pool, I made a choice."

Scott shifts, looking awkward. "But there have to be other Alphas who have lost their packs," he says. "Peter was powerful and could do everything, and he didn't even have me."

"Peter wasn't still holding onto at least five unaccepted bonds," Deaton replies. "That sort of thing, that foolish desire to keep things open - it's draining."

"Jesus," Stiles breathes. "All Derek has is Isaac."

"So you're saying that this is the reason Derek is so weak right now?" Scott asks, facing Deaton, hands balled into fists. "The reason the Skin-walker nearly killed him?"

Deaton nods.

"So, what do we do?" Scott asks.

Stiles can't remember being pack; he doesn't remember feeling any different, and it's jarring to think that somewhere, inside, he'd both accepted and initiated some kind of spiritual-level _bond_ with a guy who routinely threatened to dismember him. And it's even more rattling to think that he's _upset_ he rejected it, that he somehow severed all of it and caused this to happen without meaning to, and the fact that, at the heart of it all, he's pretty sure he wants it _back_.

When the hell did that happen?

Deaton is staring at him when Stiles rouses himself from his reverie and lifts his head once more.

"Can you guys just," Stiles mumbles, shoving his hands down in the pocket of his sweatshirt again, "give me a minute?"

He isn't even sure why he needs time alone for this - it probably doesn't work that way. He doesn't know, though, because apparently no one saw fit to _tell_ him things like this, to explain that he's been identifying as a junior to an Alpha werewolf for months without knowing it. Deaton and Scott stay where they are when Stiles walks past them, into the room where Derek once demanded that Stiles saw his arm off.

Derek had almost looked better, then, and he'd been puking black bile onto the floor. The man is pale, _really_ pale, the dead kind of pale, and it makes Stiles hesitate at the doorway. But Derek doesn't look like he's awake - whatever Deaton did, at least Derek is still breathing. Stiles can see the rise and fall of his chest, covered with barely closed gashes and whip-like angry red lines.

Stiles sits on the rickety stool, the one with one leg shorter than the other four. It rocks every time he tries to shift his weight around.

"Um," he starts, eloquently. "So, I... uh, I guess I should apologize. For, you know, rejecting your pack bond thing. In my defense, I didn't know I was doing it."

There's no response, and Stiles isn't sure if part of him was expecting one.

"You know, you could have told me," he says, suddenly cross. He's pretty sure this isn't _his_ fault; he's not the one that made someone part of his pack and then _didn't tell them about it_. "I'm not a wolf, you know, so this shit - I don't _know_ this shit. They don't tell you this sort of thing on the internet in those forums."

He scoots the stool closer, wincing as it squeaks against the tiles. "And, I mean, you're kind of a shitty leader. No offense, dude, but your main mode of operation is 'bite first, ask questions later', and this tends to not always be the best plan of attack."

He stares at Derek's chest, at the patchwork of wounds there, and the gentle, rhythmic motion of the man's breathing.

"But," Stiles says, and drops his voice down because he's conscious of Scott and Deaton outside, and how bizarrely intimate this entire thing feels, "you also sort of take care of people. You try, at least. You tried to help Scott, in your brooding, stalkerish type of way. I guess, despite my better judgments, I trust you."

Derek doesn't stir. Stiles isn't sure what he's supposed to be doing - is there supposed to be a spark, some kind of signal that it worked? He's reasonably sure there wasn't the first time around, though he was soaked through with cold pool water, so if there had been anything, he probably wouldn't have noticed anyway. He lifts a hand and then pauses, fingers suspended, feeling very, _very_ stupid.

"Derek?" he tries, and there's still nothing. Stiles lays his hand against the man's abdomen, finding the cleanest, most unblemished part of this skin for fear of agitated the not-healing slashes. "I, uh, accept this. This thing. Um, it goes both ways. For the record."

When nothing happens, Stiles snatches his hand back. His cheeks are burning; is becoming a bizarre human member of some dude's pack supposed to be this embarrassing? Stiles feels like he just recited a love poem in the front of a crowded classroom. It must not be so weird for werewolves. They have super senses and super hearing and probably super tingly feelings of familiarity and comfort that make the entire process less awkward.

Stiles stands up. There's not much else he can do, and there's no change - Derek is still unconscious, still covered in wounds, and still not doing anything other than breathing, though Stiles admits that the breathing is a good thing.

He goes back out to the lobby with his sweatshirt hood up, hoping to disappear into the fabric of it.

"What-?" Scott asks.

"Dude," Stiles cuts him off, shaking his head. "Just don't."

\--

He's still awake when his phone goes off at 2 AM, and the screen reads only _dereks awake. healing. thnk he'll b ok._

\--

The music on the radio does little to drown out her own thoughts. Lydia turns it down, and then off, sinking down into the driver's seat of her car and watching the wet pavement of the road, black in the darkness save for the illuminated beams of her headlights, disappear beneath the tread of her tires. Her phone has been largely quiet; she's heard from no one, received no updates, and she's _angry_ about it. These people - these _friends_ , they put her in danger and didn't do anything to help her pull herself out, and now there is only silence lingering in the space between them all, driving her further and further away.

Lydia thinks of Peter Hale, of hallucinations in her own house, and of crushing dried, blue flowers into the punch fountain of her own birthday party; maybe, if she were them, she wouldn't be trying to contact herself, either.

She is so lost in her memories that she barely sees the fallen tree in time - she stamps down on the brake so fast she's afraid she's snapped her heel clean off. The tree is laying flat along the road, perpendicular to the sides, completely blocking access. Lydia's tire squeal against the cement. The car swerves hard to the right, skidding across the surface, and stops a few inches from the trunk of the tree that's come down.

Lydia's breathing hard when the tires finally stop spinning. Her hands are grasping the wheel so tight that her knuckles have turned white - it takes a moment to pry them free, and then they feel stiff, like she can hardly move them. Her heart is pounding so quickly in her chest she's afraid that it will burst straight out.

Then, annoyed, by the tree and by the rain, and by the fact that her life has spiraled so far out of her own control, Lydia gets out, heels click-clacking against the cement as she stalks over to the side of the road, where the bulk is the biggest.

There's no way around the obstruction; the tree, somehow, managed to land straight across the road so completely that there's no going around, especially not in a European car without off-roading capabilities. Lydia crosses her arms over her chest, wondering if she screamed in rage at the cloudy, rainy night sky, if anyone would even hear her.

That's when she sees something in the trees. A light: a light is bobbing there, within the brush, in the space that should be nothing but inky shadows, because Lydia knows the physics and theoretical properties of illumination.

She starts towards it. She isn't even sure why.

She's been in these woods before - a few of those times, she'd really rather not remember, memories fuzzy with the influence of Peter Hale and nightmares that still wake her in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. There's something off-putting about them now, and Lydia shivers, wrapping her arms around herself as she moves. She doesn't see anything but the strange bobbing beacon of light.

She thinks of the forest in her dreams; maybe Ms. Morell was right. Maybe there _is_ something she is supposed to be doing.

Following the winding trail, the shimmering particles left hanging suspended in the air for a few seconds before they wink out of existence, Lydia eventually comes to the edge of the woods, where the trees and their roots meet the edge of the river. The river usually isn't much deeper than chest-high, and with the full moon bright in the sky overhead, Lydia can see that tonight, it's nearly bursting with added water. There shouldn't _be_ that much water - and it shouldn't be churning, bubbling, swirling like there's a whirlpool forming beneath the surface.

The wrongness smacks her in the face, just as she turns. Her chest is tight, throat constricted. She's been _led_ here, against her better judgment, despite everything that she knows and everything that she's learned, and she's furious, convinced that the tree across the road was no accident, when something slams into her with enough force to send her flying over the edge of the dirt and into the river itself.

The shock of the cold water nearly paralyzes her when she hits it. She's so surprised, so taken aback, and coupled with the icy bite, it takes her several moments before she even registers what is going on. She pushes up for air, gulping in a lungful, and is immediately pushed back down again by something that sounds like the monster from a horror movie - it sounds like a unnatural mix of a hawk, a dolphin, and a roaring lion.

Her body is in a panic. She can't breathe, and she didn't get enough air to stay beneath water for long. She flails her arms wildly, trying to find the surface in her disoriented state - she needs to feel her fingers break through, because she no longer knows which way is up. The water itself has captured her; there _is_ a whirlpool, and she's caught in it, and there's the vague, rational voice in the back of her mind telling her that it shouldn't be there. Nothing about the scene is natural. But her lungs are burning and her vision is blurred with bits that are swirling around with the pull.

She manages to burst free, just for a second, just enough to gasp and get more liquid than air and choke on the water she hoped to be oxygen. Then the whirlpool drags her beneath the surface again.

She's going to die. Even as she tries desperately to free herself of the tide's hold, she knows it; it's a terrible burden, to feel the sensation so keenly again. After the last time she felt this certainty, she woke up in a hospital to find that her entire life had changed.

Now, she doesn't think there will be a hospital in her future. Just a morgue for her corpse, bloated and waterlogged.

As her vision starts to go black, fading away, her fingertips brush something that feels like fur. It's an instantaneous reaction to grab, to find what it is and take hold; when her hand wraps around it, the thing moves, and it drags her away from the whirlpool itself. Lydia gets a half-second above the water, choking and wheezing, and her muscles are too weak and starved to allow her to help by kicking her legs. The animal pulls her free, inch by inch, until Lydia is only half-submerged, arms sinking deep into thick, dark mud.

She pushes herself upright, and her elbows give out. When she falls back down to the dirt, she's crying - the horrible, racking, absolutely agonizing sobs that are already escalating into a full-on panic attack. She can barely breathe, even now, out of the water, because her body is going into shock. She retches, hot and bitter, and can't tell her own tears from the remains of her near death experience.

There's the feel of something soft, almost plush, against her cheek, and Lydia lifts her head to find herself staring into the eyes of a wolf.

She should be afraid; after all, wolves are what got her into this entire thing. Peter Hale had stared at her with hungry, roving eyes before his teeth sunk deep into the muscles in her chest. This wolf doesn't seem dangerous. Lydia can't summon the fear - it pulled her from the water.

It seems to want something else now, and so Lydia wraps her arms around it again and holds tight, letting it drag her all the way out of the swollen river and back onto dry land.

She's still sobbing, but at least it's quieter now. The wolf doesn't make a sound, just stands there and lets Lydia take several seconds to reassert her control over her own muscles and disentangle herself.

She just knows, when her fingers fall free from the short bristles of fur. "You would have been me," she gasps, feeling stupid and wise and old and young all at the same time. "You would have been mine."

She just knows, had Peter gotten his way, that part of her would be just like this.

Whatever pushed her into the river is gone, and the water itself is slowing, like the unreal force that was pushing it into motion has dissipated. The wolf gives her a long time to drag herself up and get unsteadily back onto her feet; she no longer knows where she is, or where the road and her car are. But she trusts this creature to get her there safely.

When she puts her hands back on the tuffs of gray, feather-light fur, she is filled with the overwhelming feeling of _regret_ for the part of her own soul that could never be.

The wolf whines, like it's sensing her thoughts.

"I need," Lydia starts, and her teeth are chattering, "to get back to my car."

Gold-green eyes fix on her face; they glow in the light of the round moon overhead.

"You're my guide," Lydia whispers. She thinks back to what Ms. Morell told her, the exercises she walked Lydia through - the hypnosis, and the immunity, and all the things that Lydia knew and that her friends didn't share. "You're..."

The wolf leans in, nudging at Lydia's palm with its cold nose.

"Okay," Lydia says. She doesn't know where this strange sense of calm collectedness came from - by all accounts, she should be positively wrecked by now. "I'll follow you."

She doesn't know what just happened by the river. She doesn't know what pushed her, or where it went. But she knows that the leather of her shoes has been completely ruined, that she's missing an earring, that the tangles will take hours to get out of her hair - and that the wolf, trotting with both ears pointed upwards and tail held high, is going to get her back safely.

\--

He can feel the forest now - a bit, at least more than he could. Standing on the porch of the house, he thinks he can almost sense what he and Scott had picked up the other day in the woods, the thing that got the better of him when it attacked. It's a far cry from what he should be able to do with his senses, but an improvement over the last few weeks, and for that, Derek is grateful. It feels like a tiny part of him is returning, part of him that he was so sure he lost.

He tries to stretch out with his feelings, but can't quite seem to reach the rest of it. He knows he could shift if he wanted, and that, too, is something he feels aching, sweet relief for; not being able to access the most basic of his abilities was making him feel like an imposter in his own skin.

Still, there's a lot missing, and he can feel it like a hole singing in his chest. The bonds of pack are there, tethered to his ankles, and two of them are taut and tight - held fast and steady by both sides. Stiles' bond hums just beneath Derek's skin, along the veins pumping hot blood.

His phone rings in his back pocket.

"Hello?" he asks, when he brings it to his ear.

"There's been another attack," Isaac says, sounding a bit tinny through the line. "Another thing they are calling an accident."

Guilt settles in Derek's stomach, hard as a rock. "Another kid?"

"Two," Isaac replies. "Twins."

For a long moment, neither of them says anything. Twins should mean something - Derek feels like it should mean something, and he can't quite work out what it should be.

"Fuck," Isaac swears, and now he sounds rattled. "Derek, they're _kids_ -"

"It's not the Alpha pack," Derek tells him. He isn't sure how much he wants to tell Isaac over the phone - things are best done in person, where Derek can feel the bond that much stronger, can use the Alpha influence to calm ruffled nerves and soothe the bits of upset aggression that leak out. It's what his father used to do, when there was something the pack needed to know. "I'll call a pack meeting. We need to decide a strategy anyway."

"Pack meeting?" Isaac asks. "We could get Stiles to get some information, but he's not-"

"He is," Derek interrupts.

There's a pause, and Derek can feel Isaac's bond tremble - it feels pleased.

"Good," Isaac finally says. "I'll call everyone, then."

Derek figures this includes Scott, which is fine; they're going to need all the help they can get when going up against something like this.

"Tonight," he says, and Isaac gives him an affirmative reply before hanging up.


	5. Chapter 5

The Argents' house is still something strange. Lydia can see more of the symbols now, painted beneath the wallpaper and covering the entire house - there are more of them. There are symbols on the trees that have been drawn with blood and since washed off, symbols beneath the shutters that are carved into the boards themselves. When Lydia walks up to the front stoop, she can _feel_ the pulse of them. They hum with power that dredges up a bitter taste in the back of her mouth, a taste she isn't exactly fond of.

She thinks that maybe she understands a bit about why the symbols are here, now. Allison with her knives and her crossbow, watching Jackson come back to life as a wolf - it makes sense, even if Lydia wishes it didn't.

Still, despite everything, despite the entire last year of lies and keeping her in the dark, Allison is Lydia's friend.

"I haven't heard from you in awhile," Allison says, when she opens the door and allows Lydia entrance. The hum gets more pronounced inside the dwelling, sort of jarring, lingering with tiny pricks beneath Lydia's skin. She likes that even less than her ability to see the enchantments that have soaked into the frame. "I thought maybe something had happened."

"Something did," Lydia replies.

Allison's father comes in, with a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, and Lydia stops. She doesn't trust him - she knows he was there, when all the shit went down. She knows he has a hand in everything, and something is telling her to back away. It's an instinct that she's pretty sure she's never experienced before.

"Lydia," Chris says.

"Hello, Mr. Argent."

Chris nods upstairs, gaze moving to his daughter. "Dinner's at 6:30," he tells her.

Allison's fingernails are digging deep into Lydia's arm as they go up the stairs to Allison's bedroom. It's an odd mixture of what it was before - when Allison was new and her closet was full of dresses that did nothing for her complexion - and after, after her mother died and everything got stripped away. Lydia is pleased to see that some of the life is returning to it.

"Tell me," Allison demands. She shuts the door hard in her haste and whirls, back pressed against it and hand still gripping the handle. "What happened?"

"I don't know," Lydia says, and sits down on the bed. There's not an easy way to explain it, but Allison knows this stuff. Allison was dating Scott, and Scott's part of the whole werewolf thing.

Allison sits next to her. "Are you hurt?"

"Ms. Morell thinks I'm a shaman," Lydia says, and laughs, bitterly, because it sounds _crazy_ when she says it out loud. "She thinks I'm magic."

When Allison doesn't answer right away, Lydia looks at her. The other girl is biting on her lower lip, teeth kneading the pink flesh, in her habitual nervous habit; her eyes meet Lydia's for a split-second, and then drop to the floor and her pink-painted toenails.

"You think she's right," Lydia realizes.

"You're immune," Allison says. She tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. For some reason, she doesn't really look like she wants to talk about all of this. "You were immune to the bite and to the kanima's poison. There's not really an explanation for that."

Lydia thinks of Allison's crossbow and the arrows, tipped with silver. "And your family hunts these things."

Before the other girl can say anything, Lydia adds, "Would you have hunted me, if I'd turned?"

"No!" Allison cries, reflexively. Her whole face sort of crumples, exposed, like Lydia's struck a nerve she's been desperately trying to hide. "No, I could never."

"But you wanted to kill Derek Hale."

"Derek killed my mother," Allison hisses, sparks in her eyes.

Lydia shrugs and stares at the vanity - there are a few pictures there now, one of her and Allison in the hallways before one of the lacrosse games, and another of Allison and her father. She doesn't see a picture of Allison's mother, but she doesn't need to; the house is saturated with her, the same as it’s covered in symbols.

"He bit your mother," Lydia says, because she knows that much now. "But the rest was a choice."

"It was a forced choice," Allison replies. She's so angry her hands are balled into fists in her lap.

Lydia looks at her again. "No, it wasn't. I didn't get a choice, either. If I'd turned, I would have been one of them. But look at Scott - it's not so bad, is it? It doesn't ruin a person. It doesn't change who they are. Scott's still just a dorky kid with bad fashion sense who happens to have supernatural strength and speed on his side."

Allison bristles a bit, though Lydia can't tell if it's the bit about Scott or her mother that is agitated her, and then, after a second, seems to collapse all at once. The rage leaves her body so fast that Lydia blinks and it's gone, leaving behind just a girl who's afraid to lose everything again, who's had the world yanked out from under her feet.

Lydia knows that look - it's the same look she sees in the mirror every morning.

"I just wish she'd said something," Allison whispers to her hands.

There are tears at the corners of her eyes, and Lydia reaches over to tangle their fingers together. "I know," she says. "But I think what she did says it all."

"What would you have done if you'd turned?" Allison asks.

"I would have still been me," Lydia replies. She thinks of the gray wolf in the woods and the press of wet nose against her hand. "There just would have been more."

Allison wipes away errant tears with her free hand, looking both miserable and glad to have company again. "I really missed you."

"I missed you, too."

There's a squeeze to Lydia's hand and a watery smile on Allison's face. "But you came to tell me something," Allison says.

"In the woods," Lydia starts, and tries to block how closely the memories of being attacked by Peter Hale and the recent recollections of the events in the forest overlap, "something tried to kill me. It pushed me in the river to drown me. There was - there was something really wrong there, and I think it was some kind of magic."

"I thought you said you weren't hurt," Allison says, shifting.

"I'm not. I - a wolf saved me."

The other girl starts, eyes wide. There's a long pause, and then Allison repeats, "A wolf?"

"I'm pretty sure it was my wolf," Lydia admits, "as crazy as that sounds."

"No," Allison says, and Lydia isn't sure what she means until she continues, "it doesn't actually sound all that crazy." Her gaze sharpens; the vulnerability from before is gone, replaced with something a lot like grim determination. "What did you say attacked you?"

"I couldn't see anything, but it smelled awful."

Allison opens her mouth to say something else and her phone rings, breaking the strange spell that had fallen over the room. She reaches for it, pulling it off her beside table, and flips it open.

"Something important?" Lydia asks, feeling a bit petulant at being ignored for it.

"Pack meeting," Allison responds.

_That_ makes Lydia sit up straighter, spine going rigid. "I'm going with you," she says.

"But, I don't even know if I'm going," Allison tries, looking nervous and a little cornered.

"Then I'll go by myself," Lydia says, and sighs, exasperated. "I'm part of this, and you are all done pushing me out. I deserve to know what's going on considering that whatever it is tried to _kill_ me last night."

She gets up, because threatening motion always helps accelerate things, and Allison follows suit. "Let me just tell them that you're coming," she starts, and her fingers begin to type out a message.

Lydia grabs for the phone, tugging it free. "No," she says, shaking her head. "I've been surprised for the past year by things people didn't tell me. Now it's their turn."

She starts for the door.

"Plus," she adds, with a wry smile that Allison hesitantly returns, "if you don't ask permission, they can't tell you no."

\--

Isaac shows up first, which helps a little bit - it helps to have the pack members there, just so that the bonds, which Derek still feels he shouldn't trust, sing a bit with the connection. Scott and Stiles show up about ten minutes later, and Derek isn't entirely sure how to handle Stiles.

The bond is there, happy to be acknowledged, and Derek _feels_ it in his chest, like a sudden weight was dropped on top of him, but it's still difficult. He's trusted things before that blew up in his face in a shower of ash and smoke and smoldering flesh; he fears making the same mistake again.

"Deaton told you about the skin-walkers?" Scott asks, as he deposits himself on the floor because Derek still hasn't bothered to get anything to sit on.

"Skin-walkers?" Isaac parrots, confused.

Stiles proceeds to pull out what must be half a ream of paper from his backpack, slapping it down onto the floor boards. The pages are covered in handwritten marks and highlights over the printed text, bits where he's drawn arrows or numbers for subsequent pages.

When he catches Derek's gaze, which has to look perplexed, Stiles shrugs and says, "Couldn't sleep much recently. Figured I should be doing something useful."

"They don't sound friendly," Isaac says.

"Decidedly not," Scott agrees. "Derek and I found one up in the woods, near the river, and it nearly kil-"

"The point is," Derek interrupts, because Isaac doesn't need to _know_ that his own bond was the only thing holding Derek anywhere near being an Alpha - the sort of weakness there, the humiliation of losing all that, is more than Derek is willing to share at present, "that they are absolute evil mutations of shape shifters."

Stiles holds up one of the pages. "They kill children and use their insides to power themselves. Sound like anything we might have noticed lately?"

Isaac pales a bit.

"What I don't get," Scott says, "is why they're here. I mean, the Alpha pack was here, so it seems like if they wanted them, they would have skipped town, too, right?"

The boy is often more perceptive than people give him credit for, Derek included. Derek nods. "So whatever they want is still here."

At the edge of the driveway, there's a noise - Derek hears it before he feels it, same as Scott and Isaac. From the way Scott perks up, shoulders straightening, Derek knows he's realized that it's Allison. He's wary, because her scent carries with it the tang of hunters and weapons, of betrayal and desperation and something that Derek is pretty sure she still hasn't forgiven him for. And she's not alone.

Scott has the door open before they can knock.

"Hey," Allison says; she has the decency to look a bit sheepish, a bit resigned. She spares Derek only a single glance before entering, with Lydia in tow. "Pack meeting?"

"Sit," Scott tells her, gesturing towards the floor.

Derek looks at Lydia, who has her arms crossed over her chest. She's staring at him, with force, with steel, with eyes that are almost asking him to attempt to assert his power and throw her out. There's iron there, flint and ember, and he's reminded of what a formidable force she would have been as a wolf.

Stiles' hand closes around Derek's elbow, startling him - he's losing his edge. "Can I talk to you?" Stiles hisses, and without even waiting for a reply, starts to drag Derek through the doorway. "In the kitchen?"

It's even more awkward there without the others, and Stiles seems to feel it, too, because he drops his hand as if he's been stung and shoves both hands into his hoodie pocket.

"I'm glad you're okay," he starts. He's nervous; Derek can hear the rapid-fire pounding of his heart, like a rabbit being hunted. But Derek is pretty sure that this isn't what Stiles yanked him into the other room to discuss.

When he levels the boy a long, expectant stare, Stiles says, "I think I know what they want. Or, uh, _who_."

"Me," Lydia says, from the doorway. Her arms are still crossed over her chest.

Stiles jumps - she'd come from behind him, scaring him, and the rhythm of his already-racing heart ramps up another notch.

"What," Stiles gasps, a hand going to his chest, "the hell, Lydia."

"This was a private conversation," Derek says.

Lydia rolls her eyes. "In a house with no doors. Besides, you're talking about me. Those things are after me, aren't they."

It's more statement than question, and it was Stiles' hypothesis, not his own, so Derek remains silent. Stiles, after a moment of attempting to compose himself again, sort of sputters his way through an agreement.

"It's the only thing that really makes sense," he says. "You're immune, you're this strange enigma that we don't understand, and it only makes sense that other supernatural beings would want to use that."

"I think they want to kill me," Lydia tells him. "Something tried to drown me in the woods."

If possible, Stiles looks even more caught off-guard. "Are you sure?" he asks.

"Of course, I'm sure," Lydia sighs; it seems like she wanted to make another quip, and thought better of it. "It wasn't exactly an experience that I'd like to repeat again."

There's something else there, beneath the surface, something she isn't telling them, but she doesn't elaborate. When Derek peers a bit closer, trying to delve beneath the carefully constructed surface, he gets a steady, unreadable glare in return. In the long run, he can't really fault the girl for keeping things from them - they did the same thing last year.

"Well, then I guess we know what they are gunning for," Stiles says, grim.

"I think you should know," Lydia starts, sort of suddenly, like the words burst from her mouth without her complete consent, "that I could help you. I can do things. And I'm smart."

"I'm smart," Stiles tries.

There's a sharp quirk at the sides of her mouth, and then it smoothes back into gloss-covered lines. "I know," she says. It feels an awful lot like a compliment, despite the edge to her voice. "And we're smarter together."

"Why would you help us?" Derek asks.

"I know you don't trust me," Lydia says, and it's not a lie. "And I don't trust you either. But know that whatever is out there, I want it gone. I didn't want anything to do with this, and it being here is keeping me from getting out, and I want to drive it as far away as possible if killing it isn't an option."

There are a lot of half-truths there, but nothing that skips her heartbeat up, and it's as true as Derek figures they'll get from here, even if there are things she is playing close to the chest. He looks to Stiles, instinctually, because Stiles is pack and it feels right to do so. Stiles gives him a small shrug.

"By the way, this isn't optional," Lydia tells them both, and disappears back into the other room with a wave of ginger hair.

"She is a truly beautiful person," Stiles says, after she's gone.

They're alone in the kitchen now, and Derek is once again acutely confused as to why it's so awkward to be standing there. For a second, Stiles seems to feel the same way, too, and then he looks to Derek again and smiles, wide - a real smile, the kind that stretches his face and brightens his eyes. The bond there thrums, resonating with the confirmation.

"Well," Stiles says, and the grin stays where it is, "you're the Alpha."

He doesn't add _you're my Alpha_ , but Derek hears it anyway, and after Stiles follows Lydia to the other room with the others, Derek stays where he is, trying to sort out the mess of frazzled, grateful feelings that have tangled up with Stiles' bond, entwined and tangled and hopelessly inseparable.

\--

Stiles spends the next few nights knee-deep in research mode. It's acceptable to be bent over his computer like he is because the death of the twins - another "accident" that is finally being investigated due to the fact that there have simply been too many "accidents" involving children lately - has kept his father rather busy, and it keeps Stiles from feeling guilty when he's blowing off dinners and movie nights.

He's adding information he's digging up on a Navajo forum, tied to the Native American tribes still living down in Arizona, when his father knocks on the door and nearly gives Stiles a heart attack.

"Sorry," his father apologizes. He glances at Stiles' screen, the most critical of windows which have been hastily minimized, and his mouth thins further. "I have to go back in tonight - we're pulling overtime on this rash of deaths."

"I know," Stiles says. "It's important, it's about kids."

The Sheriff, not entirely convinced, pauses for a second at the doorway and then takes a step in, hesitant, almost like he's expecting something to jump out of the closet or slither out from beneath the bed. When there's nothing but the slight rise of Stiles' eyebrows, the man sighs. He looks tired.

"You know, I haven't pushed you," his father says. "I haven't made you talk about these things you're stubbornly keeping from me. I figured that you had things to work through, and it was private, and I'm trying to respect that."

Stiles feels, if at all possible, even worse. He swallows down the bits of his heart that have torn away through the last few months. "I know."

"And..." his father starts, and then trails off. His gaze roves around the room, helpless. When his eyes settle on Stiles again, there's just nothing there; like when Stiles' mother had died, they are void of anything. It hurts like hell to know that he's been the one to carve out his father's soul this time, and he did it on purpose. "And I feel like I'm losing you."

"Dad," Stiles tries.

His father holds up a hand. "I know you're a teenager, I know this... happens. But there's a wall between us and I don't know how to break through it. And I don't think that you even want to, since you are the one who put it up."

Stiles glares down at his palms. He doesn't say anything - he _can't_ say anything, since everything his dad is saying is completely true.

"Do you want me to-" he finally starts, when he thinks he can keep his voice steady.

"No," his father interrupts. He shakes his head, and heads back to the door. His hand freezes for a moment on the doorframe. "I don't know anymore, Stiles."

After he's gone, Stiles is pretty sure that he doesn't know, either.

\--

The next day finds Lydia in a place she has been only once before: Stiles' bedroom. It's messier than the last time she was here, and seeing it without the haze of tears and quiet, aching despair leaves a far different impression. Still, despite the clothing strewn haphazardly near the closet doors, there is a definite method to the madness. Stiles' room seems to be organized much like his mind is, with interconnecting bits and segues that make sense to him and him alone.

"I'm not really sure where to start," Stiles says, rubbing the back of his head like he's nervous.

"I want to see everything," Lydia tells him, and dumps her purse on the bed without another thought. "I need to know everything that you know."

Stiles opens up his computer, fingers clicking across the keys at impressive speeds. "I've got a bestiary here, but it's rough. I've been piecing together what I can from things that we've learned or been told, and we lost a lot when Gerard disappeared-"

"Show me," Lydia demands.

She sits on the edge of the bed, peering over Stiles' shoulder. After a few minutes, he gets restless and anxious - she can see it in his muscles, in the way they are tight and his shoulders are rigidly straight; he gets up and offers her the computer chair instead, and takes the bed, pulling out several old-looking books from a plastic sack beneath the mattress itself.

They work in silence for awhile. Stiles has an impressive amount of information accumulated - if Lydia had been part of this, if they'd given her the pages she is scrolling through in Word, she might have been able to identify more before. More of what was happening to her, around her. As it is, she tries to push the feelings of irritation away, sweeping them under the desk, because what really matters is that she has the knowledge _now_.

She stops on page 27, and points to the screen. "This," she says, to get Stiles' attention, and she doesn't turn back because she can hear him moving around to get a better look at what she's paused on. "I've seen this symbol before."

"That's a ward," Stiles says. "Deaton gave me a book of them, and I've been cataloguing them when I can. That one's for protection."

"It's covering the Argents' house."

Stiles gives her a strange look. "They painted it there?"

"Beneath the wallpaper," she replies. She shrugs. "Beneath the shutters, on whatever surfaces they could find."

"Wait, it's not visible from the outside," Stiles says, "so how can you even see it?"

She looks at him, long and hard and giving away nothing. "I just can." His shoulders sag; admitting defeat is an odd look on his face, like it doesn't belong. She turns back to the computer, ready to start scrolling again, and adds, "It's outside your house, too."

This startles him. "What?"

"On the trees out front," she says. "I thought you did it."

"No," Stiles says, and shakes his head. He sits back down on the mattress, heavy, fingers playing over his chin as if he's deep in thought. "I never - oh."

When he doesn't seem keen to continue, Lydia glares over her shoulder at him.

"Derek," is all he offers.

"Tell me about Derek," Lydia says.

Stiles shrugs again. He meets her gaze and there's something hard there, something fierce. Something that thrums like loyalty against Lydia's ribs as she tries to decipher it. She's seen the same expression on Allison's face, and it always seemed so natural there. Stiles wears it the same way; in command, embracing it, nurturing it like embers that need care to flourish.

"He doesn't have any idea what he's doing," Stiles admits, "but he's doing the best he can. The guy never really got any instruction since his family burned to death."

"Kate Argent," Lydia says.

Stiles' eyes are sharp. "Peter?"

He's good. Lydia shakes off the memories that float up with the admission - images of Peter's past. She sometimes woke with them still in her brain, after even the strangest and worst of the nightmares passed, and it took her until his resurrection to make heads or tails of what they were. Now, she is both glad and unhappy to still have them. It's just another piece of herself that she'll never completely get back.

"I know you killed him," she says, and it's as close to agreement as she can get with her throat constricting. She focuses on the pages she's scrolling through, trying to memorize what she can that looks like it might be immediately helpful. "And I know that you didn't do a very good job."

"Peter killed Kate."

"Yeah," Lydia says, swallowing. "I remember that, too."

This seems to cause the conversation to fade off. Stiles resumes his position on the bed with the tomes in his lap, and every minute or so Lydia hears the soft turning of the pages, accompanied with a few sighs or hums of disappointment. She is almost to the end of the Word document, Stiles' digital bestiary, when the pressure in her chest becomes too much to bear.

"You know we'll never work," she says, a bit too fast, a bit too rushed; she just wants this over with. "You and me."

There's nothing for a long few moments. Finally, Stiles lets out a mirthless little laugh and says, "Yeah."

"I'd just really like to get past this part. I'd really..." Lydia trails off, which is stupid, which she shouldn't _do_ now, not when she's trying so hard to keep that facade in place. "I'd really like us to be friends."

Stiles doesn't reply.

"I don't have a lot of friends," she says. "I'd just really like one of them to be you."

"Yeah," Stiles repeats, a little slurred - like his tongue is too big in his mouth. "Yeah, I'd like that, too."

Lydia lets out the breath she'd been holding. "Good."

They go back to silence.

"You're taking this better than I thought you would," Lydia tells him, once the turning of the book pages has resumed.

"I think I sort of idealized you in my head," he says. It's one of the most honest things she's ever heard him say, and part of her loves him for it.

She laughs, clicking the red 'x' because she's reached the end of the document and her mind is swimming with supernatural beings now. "No, I really am just that perfect."

"What are we going to do?" Stiles asks, and she's pretty sure he isn't talking about them anymore - at least not just them, the two of them in his bedroom. She turns the desk chair around to look at him. One of his socks is a different color at the toe: gold instead of white.

"We find a way to kill them."

"Deaton didn't know of any," Stiles says. "And he's really our best source of information on the subject. With Peter gone and Gerard missing, I don't think the Argents would be up for swapping Cliff's Notes."

Lydia taps her fingernails against her knee. "I might have an idea, but I'll need you to do some more research first."

He doesn't look adverse to it. He shuts the books in his lap, spinning his legs around so that his toes are very close to her own, hanging off the bed.

"Okay," he says.

"I need you to find everything you think is helpful and accurate about shamanism."

He doesn't ask why - she loves him for that, too. "And what about you?"

"I'm going to go see the guidance counselor again," Lydia says.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to the fact that I got REALLY sick the past week, I am super behind word-count wise. So this may not get finished in November, but I will continue to power through anyway! Stupid flu. :(

He's driving when he smells it - the same rotten, mutated stench that had caused Scott to get him several days ago. It hits him hard, just as it did the first time he encountered it, like the fist of something twice his size. It's so powerful that for a moment, he can barely concentrate on the road. He has to pull over, fingers gripping the steering wheel like a lifeline, attempting to stabilize the instincts that are suddenly in an uproar inside his chest.

He'd been too weak to really feel it the first time, but Scott had been right - it's overwhelmingly _wrong_ and every fiber of his being, wolf and human, are made anxious and upset by it. Derek takes a long breath, and then another, and gets out of the Camaro. If he could smell it so strongly, then whatever it is must be nearby.

Skin-walkers. That's what Deaton had said. People who were men once, twisted by power and greed, who took the lives of innocent and ate the corpses to feed their own abilities - beings so unnatural that even other shape shifters were horrified by the existence.

Derek wonders what Peter would say about this, were he here, what his computer might know on the subject. He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and starts to move around the car and into the woods - he's still not at full capacity, but the urge to shift is lying in wait just beneath his skin, an old friend, and he's got enough to investigate whatever is going on.

He follows the awful smell into the trees and through them; it's easy to follow something when the rest of nature is giving it a clear path, trying to stay out of the line of fire. Derek walks over the muddy, rain-logged leaves that are too soggy to make much noise beneath his boots, until he comes to the edge of a clearing.

He doesn't know how they didn't know he was coming.

It's only after, looking back as their heads snap up, that he thinks maybe they did.

The first one rushes him before he gets much of a chance to take in the scene. What he does see is a fire, and something hanging from a branch over it, almost obscured by the smoke, and then the shape shifter is on him. He should have paid more attention to what Stiles shared at the meeting, should have remembered this more - the man, the thing that used to be a man, is wearing a pelt and slowly melting into it, until he's more cat than anything: long, wicked claws and impossibly good night vision.

Derek shifts and lunges, meeting it halfway. His vision is better as a wolf than human, but still not as good as a cougar. At least in the clearing, away from the tree cover, he has the moon on his side; it's bright and illuminating the shapes moving below. Derek swipes with his claws and misses, catching nothing but air, and the cougar screams an unnatural cry before aiming for Derek's throat with its teeth.

He tumbles and rolls, catching it off-balance with the sudden movement. The shape shifter can turn into the animal, but it lacks the natural instincts; the cougar doesn't move with the liquid grace the hunting cats should have.

And it smells like a rotten, half-decayed animal by the side of the road, assaulting all of his wolf's senses.

It roars and swipes for his face, barely missing, and that's when the second one strikes from behind. Whatever it is, Derek can't place it - without being able to see, too focused on the cougar, he can rely only on the sense of smell, and it, too, is just a mutilated, tangled mess of odors that make him want to retch. He whirls with claws and gets a bit of fur, nothing major, and another smack hard on the back that sends him reeling into the leaves.

He's not powerful enough to fight off both of them, and as he struggles back up to his knees, he's trying to figure out the best way to _run_ and get away alive when Isaac comes hurtling out of the trees and lands on the second shape shifters' back.

A bear - that's what the second one is. Like the berserkers of old Europe, it's a somewhat small, slightly hump-backed bear that is screaming in anger as Isaac sinks his claws in deep to tendons and muscle and refuses to let go.

It leaves Derek to take care of the cougar. He jumps up, pivoting on his heels and moving forward with the innate knowledge the wolf side of his brain has - attack as a pack, weaken the back legs. Take the animal down and then go for the throat.

He takes a hard hit to his chest that sprays blood across the trees, and he's already blocking out the pain when he returns the favor. His grip is better than the cougar's because he's relying on his human side to keep the muscles tight; the creature howls, spinning and thrashing, and Derek barely holds on when it crashes him back-first into the nearest tree.

"Isaac!" he cries, and _tugs_ , hard, on the pack bond between them. Isaac's head snaps up like he's at attention - he jumps down from the bear's back and throws himself onto the cougar. It opens Derek up and he readies himself to jump over Isaac _and_ the cat for the bear, but then the second one is gone - disappeared into the trees, and almost immediately out of sight.

Derek starts in confusion, wolf trying to piece out where the thing has faded to, and Isaac gives a growl of frustration. When Derek turns, he realizes the cougar has fled, too. They are alone by the clearing and the still-smoking fire, trying to hold onto the fraying edges of whatever is happening around them.

He's never known anything that could leave so fast he couldn't pick up the trail. He even sniffs the air a few times, still attempting to deduce what happened, and comes up empty; it's like the things were never there, which doesn't make any sense given how powerful and _awful_ the stench of them was.

Isaac is half-shifted back, canines retracting. "That was them, wasn't it."

"Yeah," Derek says. He keeps his claws out, just in case, but he's pretty sure they aren't coming back. They may have meant to get him, to lure him out of his car - if they are people, or were people once, enough to retain memories, then they could be anywhere. They could have been following him, waiting until he drove near the area of woods they had watched. There are at least two; there could very well be more.

His wolf is angry, furious at the loss of the leads and the near-defeat on the battlefield.

"What do you suppose they wanted this time?" Isaac asks.

Derek walks to the fire and snaps the dangling object off the branch. It's hot, still, and covered in soot, but as he wipes away the blackened bits of it, he can see that it's a small doll. The specifics of it have burned away, and he's not sure he would have been able to recognize them anyway, but it's something - something more than they had, which was nothing.

"I think we need to get this to Deaton," he says. If they are indeed after Lydia, then the doll in his hands could be their portal to her. He's not sure what another possession would wreck there - or what she could be capable of in the wrong hands, hands more twisted than even Peter's were. "He may not know, but it's all we've got."

"Gross," Isaac comments, glaring down at the charred remains in Derek's hand.

\--

She has to wait until both of her parents are gone to go outside, hugging her thin over shirt to her chest. The iron gate of the backyard won't work as well as the trees will, but being iron, it creates a barrier - and if she can enchant the barrier, she can use the entire thing as a ward: one all-encompassing, iron ward. She has the symbol scribbled down on a sheet of paper that she got from Stiles, and she hopes that her scrawled version of it is close enough to being correct.

Lydia pauses at the gate. Part of her doesn't want to go outside of it; she knows, logically, that the gate itself means nothing right now. It meant nothing to Peter Hale, who strolled through it like he owned the place. And it generally means nothing to the raccoons that scale it daily to rummage in the trash cans her father tends to forget at the back of the yard. But still, it feels like some sort of protection, a rudimentary palisade that can keep the dark things away.

She shivers, pulls her shirt closer, and opens it up. Leaves crunch beneath her feet as she moves to the opposite side and stops.

The symbol isn't hard. She doesn't even need to look at it again, since she's already memorized the strokes to it, but she does it anyway - psychological reassurance, she knows. She traces her fingers over it one last time, and then closes her eyes. She only hopes that the black Sharpie she brought will do the trick.

She starts to draw the symbol on the fence support, the largest one near the gate, where the swing hooks are, and curses when she can't see the black ink on the iron once she's made a mark. She needs to do this right, and she's having trouble with it.

"Focus," she murmurs to herself. Ms. Morell told her that she has to be able to concentrate - her power comes from strength of will. Lydia drops her arm to her side and tries to center herself again. She squeezes her eyes shut, tuning out the sounds around her. She doesn't let her mind settle on the breeze playing with her hair, or the sound of cars past the row of houses, or the insects singing cheerfully to her left.

Then there is a crack behind her, sharp and loud, and she spins with her heart already clogging her throat.

It's her wolf. It stands a few feet away, poised and steady, pinning her with an amber gaze, until Lydia lets out the breath she'd unconsciously sucked in.

"Just you," she says; her heart is pounding so hard the echoes are doubling back against her ears. Then she tilts her head a bit, trying to get a better look. There's red on the wolf's front leg, the right one. She leans in to get a closer look, and the wolf doesn't move, lets her draw near.

"What happened?" she asks. She kneels on the grass, blades tickling the exposed skin beneath her skirt. It doesn't look like an animal mark - it's too clean, made too smoothly. And the wolf doesn't seem bothered by it, either. It waits, as her fingers skate along the outside of it, and then, when she looks at it in question, like it can answer, like it will answer, it cocks its head to one side.

Lydia dabs her thumb across it, slicking her fingertip with it. "Are you telling me to use this instead?"

Her wolf bows its head. Lydia takes it as an affirmative.

Coating her forefinger and middle finger with as much of the blood as she feels comfortable with - and when did this become her life, that she finds such a task so easy to shrug off? - she gets to work painting the symbol on the iron. She can't see the blood against the metal, either, but she can _feel_ it; the blood is humming with power, like the symbols etched into the Argents' house are. She drags a long semi-circle and then pulls down, making a line through the middle.

When the symbol is complete, she can feel it flare to life. It buzzes for a long, heavy moment, and then glows for a split second so quickly Lydia is sure she must have imagined it. After it fades, she can see no trace of the blood on the rail. Even when she leans it to brush her fingers across where she just painted lines, there is nothing. She can still feel it; she knows it's there. It's the itch beneath her skin running along her veins, the same blood that's pumping through her own heart.

Her wolf is gone when she turns, but she didn't expect anything different.

\--

Derek hops in through Stiles' window. It would be noiseless, except he doesn't see the stack of books that Stiles has pushed against the far wall - easier to cover when his father comes with dirty clothes, because he knows his dad won't go rooting through stacks of potentially soiled boxer shorts. Derek ends up tripping on them, skidding forward a bit, and that's what alerts Stiles to the man's presence.

It's also the noise that nearly gives him a heart attack.

" _Jesus_ ," Stiles groans, pressing a hand to his heart. The pack is going to be the death of him, driving him to a nervous breakdown before the age of 40. "Can you use the _door_?"

Derek ignores this, even though Stiles knows he must have already realized that the Sheriff isn't at home. "The research you've been doing," Derek says, and nods towards Stiles' computer screen, which is covered with the barebones outline of his English paper on mid-1800's American literature. "Did it say anything about using dolls?"

"Dolls you dress up?" Stiles asks. He does it just to be annoying; he's already tabbing over to the bestiary that is permanently open whenever he's home. "Dolls that talk? Dolls that walk? Tickle-me Elmo?"

"Stop babbling," Derek sighs, sounding more weary than annoyed.

"Babble comes cheap, don't you agree?"

Derek looms over Stiles' shoulder, a presence that Stiles could probably feel from three feet away - Derek has that air about him. The sort of vibe that when he's looking at you from across a crowded Starbucks, you'd be able to tell. You'd probably drop your overpriced latte trying to figure out who is staring you down, looking like he's thinking about ripping your throat out.

"Why are you asking me, anyway?" Stiles asks. "Deaton's the go-to guy for this. I'm just hunting down rumors on Internet forums."

"I trust you," Derek replies.

When Stiles pauses, hand trembling an inch above the track pad, he glances over his shoulder and thinks, judging from the expression on Derek's features, that the admission startled Derek as much as it surprised Stiles himself.

"Okay," Stiles says, slowly. "Because I'm pack."

He doesn't really _want_ to talk about this _thing_ , this awkwardness, the elephant in the room poised between them, but he thinks maybe they should. They haven't yet, and it's making Stiles a little nervous.

"Yeah," Derek agrees.

"Why do you want me in your pack?" Stiles asks.

Derek sighs again, running a hand through his hair. "Will you just see what you've got on this?"

Stiles clicks resolutely on the 'minimize' button and spins his chair around.

"No," he says. "What I want to know is why you would ever give me a pack invitation when you know my best friend is the one werewolf who continually denies your oh-so-thoughtfully worded acceptance letter."

"Stiles," Derek growls, but he sits down on the edge of the bed, and it's enough resignation for Stiles to keep going.

"I mean, if you are recruiting humans, why not recruit the veterinarian who knows way more about supernatural crap than I do? Why not recruit somebody powerful, who has martial arts training or at least is of legal age to rent a getaway vehicle?"

Derek is quiet for a long while. When he finally does speak, he looks annoyed - annoyed, maybe, that Stiles has wormed his way so far down in his defenses.

"You're good with this stuff," he says, quietly.

"I'm good with trolling message boards," Stiles points out. "That doesn't really make me an expert here."

He gets a snort for that. "Don't you see? That's exactly it."

"You want me in your pack because I play a lot of online games?"

"You _accept_ it," Derek says. "You take everything with so little disbelief you should be _committed_ ; humans don't just do that. If someone wasn't raised a hunter, or raised in a family that had something to do with this, they are so blissfully unaware it's dangerous. And you - you don't do that. You act like it's normal when I come asking you to research witches and spells and fairy tales."

Stiles laughs - his fingers are twitching nervously in his lap. "You know, I thought I was crazy when Scott first got bit. I thought I was losing my mind when all signs pointed to 'werewolf'. Not like WebMD gave me that diagnosis, but still. You know what I mean."

Derek's expression is somewhat incredulous, which is an odd look on him. "You're the best sort of human to have in a pack," he says, and this time his voice is so quiet Stiles almost doesn't hear it.

"Did your..." Stiles starts, and then stops. He's unsure if he should continue. He might be _pack_ , but that doesn't necessarily make them _friends_. Still, self-preservation has never really been his strong suit, so he continues, "Did your family have humans in the pack?"

"Born humans," Derek replies. His gaze drops down to his knees.

There were humans in the Hale house when it burned, then. "Shit," Stiles breathes. "Sorry."

When Derek looks back up, his gaze has hardened itself into its normal state of 'irritated'.

"Right," Stiles says, and swirls his chair back around. "Dress-up dolls for skin-walkers."

He scrolls down a few pages in the bestiary, and then stops. "I found some information about their rituals on a Native American legends page. It didn't have a section on dolls, but it mentioned using likenesses when casting spells and curses - is that what you mean?"

Derek leans over his shoulder. He doesn't speak for a long time, but Stiles watches his eyes read over the passage several times, darting from side to side.

"Maybe," he says, finally. He doesn't pull back; his warmth is an odd sort of pulse, like a second heartbeat in Stiles' chest. "I don't know. We caught them in the middle of it."

"Great," Stiles replies. "Guess we all have to watch out for some sort of curse, then."

Still, Derek doesn't move, and Stiles starts to feel antsy, sort of like when he drinks coffee even though he knows he really doesn't need the caffeine.

"You know Scott's never going to join your pack," he says, softly. "Not officially, anyway."

"Yeah," Derek says. He starts to pull away, and then stops - his body jerks like he changed his mind right in the middle of the action. With one palm propped against the side of Stiles' computer desk, he keeps himself upright, turning his head to meet Stiles' gaze. "So why did you?"

And there's the million dollar question, the very thing Stiles has been asking himself night after night since this whole thing began - since he made the decision to take back the pack bond that he'd unknowingly accepted the first time. It's one of those things that he's pretty sure he knows and is repressing, like memories of the first time his dad caught him jerking off in the bathroom or the visit to the doctor when they were first told that his mom was sick. His brain is keeping it dampened so that he doesn't have to deal with the repercussions of the realization.

He can't really tell Derek that, though, because that only leads to another, even worse question - why would he not want to deal with the answer?

After what feels like a lifetime, Stiles wrenches his gaze away. His heart is pounding in his chest, a rabbit kicking against his ribs in double time. "I guess I think you're okay, despite it all," he tries. It's weak, and he knows Derek can hear the lie anyway.

He really dislikes the werewolf power to figure that out.

For some reason, Derek doesn't push the issue. He just stands back up again, disappearing from the side of Stiles' vision, and Stiles lets out a small, whispered prayer of relief.

"Since we don't know what they were doing," Derek says, "stay here. It's safer."

"Because you painted a protection ward outside my front door?" Stiles asks.

Derek levels him a glare. "Just stay here."

"You know I'm not going to listen to you."

"I know," Derek replies. "Just like you know I'm going to keep telling you to do it anyway."

There's a sharp trill of something in Stiles' chest then, something he can't quite name. "At least you recognize this in me. It's a very beautiful, symbiotic relationship we have, don't you think?"

"You're going to get yourself killed," Derek says. He's back at the window, half-out, ready to jump down to the ground. His fingers tighten enough on the windowsill that Stiles can see his knuckles whiten.

"And that would be bad," Stiles tries, more question than anything else.

The look Derek gives him is unreadable, and before Stiles can try to parse it further, the other man is gone, leaving behind only the empty window and Stiles' erratic, racing heartbeat.

\--

Lydia dreams of the forest again that night.

It's dark when she arrives - or at least, when she finds herself there, standing among the trees. But this time, she tries not to be afraid. She closes her eyes and tries to _feel_ the living plants around her, tries to stretch out her feelings. She can hear the hum of them, just like the symbol, only different; more pronounced, more even, and less hazy.

When she opens her eyes again, her wolf is by her side, nudging at her palm with its wet muzzle.

"Okay," she says, more to herself than the creature by her side. "Let's go."

She knows they are in the shadows, hiding and waiting, but she can't stand still. There's no use in staying in one spot, not now that she knows what she does. She moves through the trees, trying to pick out the path she'd found the last time - she can't see it, but if she clears her mind enough, her legs pick it out without conscious thought.

They weave their way through the forest, and Lydia can hear the creatures behind her. _Skin-walkers_ : mutated, twisted humans with the ability to transform themselves into whatever creatures they wear the pelts of. But they are an abomination to nature, a kink in the normal order, and it makes them vulnerable in a way that other things aren't.

They don't attack her. They are following her, and she can hear them copying her movements in the dark, but they don't lunge for her. Whatever they are doing, they are being more cautious now, and Lydia takes that as a sign that she's gaining power. If they see her as a threat, as someone to tread lightly around, it means she is onto something.

Lydia is done being powerless; from now on, they deal with her at her best, at her brightest, with everything she's got inside.

After awhile, following the path that she can see only with the sense she isn't sure she could identify, they reach the clearing at the center, the middle of the spiral from which everything else extends. Lydia crouches down, feeling wet leaves stick to her skin. It feels like the mud near the river had, right before she'd been attacked, and it creates a knot in her stomach that weighs heavy like lead.

"Now what?" she asks the wolf. They are growing restless around her. They might acknowledge she has something, but here, in this place, they have the advantage. She can hear them murmuring, a strange, rhythmic sort of language. She doesn't know what it means, but she knows it's _wrong_ ; she has to stop it.

Her fingers close down around a rock, and without really thinking, she flings it into the shadows where she thinks they have gathered. She hears it hit the brush, and the resulting scampering from the spot.

Something laughs.

"I'm not afraid of you," Lydia lies, jaw clenching. She wishes she could see, she wishes she had a _weapon_. The wolf at her side is growling, but remains where it is, and she's not sure whether she's glad for its companionship or angry at it for refusing to attack the demons like it could.

She stands again, knees knocking together. She is suddenly freezing.

"Come out and fight me then," she hisses.

That does the trick. One of them hurtles out of the darkness, and as it rushes for her, she notes that she can _see_ it only through the extra sense that isn't sight; she can feel it more than see it, and it lets her identify where it is. She ducks down and it sails mostly over her, grazing her right shoulder; the wolf snarls and darts for it. Lydia can see a flurry of claws and teeth, can hear the jaw snapping down. Crouched down on her knees again, she grapples around for something, anything, to use as a weapon against it.

When she reaches out, she can _feel_ the hole; the creature itself is like a black hole devouring a star. It's an absence, a ball of nothing. Where there should be a soul and life, there is only emptiness. The call of the void is what makes it so hungry, why it needs to eat the living matter of other things - it burns through it like a car requires fuel.

Feeling it smacks Lydia in the face with the awful, terrifying feeling of non-existence, of straddling the line between the world of the living and that of the dead. She reaches her hand out in the air, listening to the angry noises between her wolf and the demon itself.

She _pulls_.

She can't manipulate the creature itself, because it simply doesn't really _exist_ , at least not in the way that it should. But she can feel the earth around it, the trees and the air and the things that _do_ , and those she can move. She guides them to one side, pushing them away, until the demon's black hole can find nothing to feed on. The skin-walker gasps, choked, backing away and falling down; she can hear it hit the sodden ground, just as she can hear the wolf lunge again to attack in the moment of weakness.

Lydia twists as hard as she can. She can send it off, back to where it belongs, back to _nothingness_ , and it shrieks so loud the sound resonates in her ears. She wants desperately to let go, because her muscles are shaking and trembling with exhaustion, and she's poring far too much of herself into the action, but it's _working_. The shape shifter screams again, and the wolf's jaws snap down hard on its throat, and then there is nothing.

Lydia lets go with a gasp and topples forward, suddenly unable to support her own weight. Around her, there is a long groan, the trees sigh, the momentum of it rippling beneath her palms. Her wolf is at her side, muzzle against her neck, and Lydia struggles to breathe again: in and out, one hitched lungful after another.

There is a keen whine near her ear, and she opens her eyes to see her bedroom window and the sun shining in through the curtains.

When she sits up, feeling shaken and weak, she unclenches her fist to watch dirt fall down on her sheets.


	7. Chapter 7

The real problem with fighting supernatural forces and trying to figure out one's own feelings about the resident said head supernatural creature in town is that around you, life continues to go on. Which is why Stiles finds himself waiting in an abysmally long line at the post office trying to mail out several old books that some kid on EBay paid $15 for - it seems that everyone in Beacon Hills is trying to mail something today.

It takes a half hour to get through the line, and then the postal worker gives him sass when he attempts to add insurance to the package (why she doesn't believe that the History of Comic Books Parts 1 & 2 need protection is beyond him), and he's in a fairly sour mood by the time he gets back outside. He scrolls through his phone to find a whopping total of zero missed messages, and nearly falls over when he finds the ticket stuck beneath his windshield wiper.

Meter is five minutes over the allotment of time.

"You have _got_ to be kidding me!" Stiles exclaims, and nearly drops his phone when he flings his arms to either side. Of all the times for the Sheriff's Office to _actually_ give him a ticket for something illegal he does, this is not the one he would have picked.

He's angry and annoyed and halfway through composing a somewhat scathing message to his father when he sees it - across the street, near the small park nestled between the grocery store and the local elementary school, there's a young woman standing stick-straight and staring off into the cluster of trees near the corner. As Stiles watches, she continues to stand there, ignoring everything around her, and then, all of a sudden, turns and starts off in the opposite direction.

"Definitely suspicious," Stiles says to his Jeep, and gives her a brief pat on the hood before he checks for traffic and then jogs across the road itself to follow. She's moving fast - too fast, the kind of fast of someone with a definite purpose, and she's so blind to everything else around her that she nearly bowls over an old woman carrying a sack of groceries.

If he hadn't thought it was weird before, he definitely would now; the girl, who is probably no more than Derek's age with a high, dark ponytail that bobs from side to side with every purposeful step, is forcing people to move out of her way as she stalks resolutely down the sidewalk. Stiles keeps behind her, muttering a half-hearted apology to the old woman who has now stooped down to pick up the fallen vegetables.

The strange woman turns a corner and disappears, and Stiles picks up his pace to match her. He doesn't know where she's going - there isn't much on this side of town, just a residential development that's still under construction and the old county highway that is widely ignored in favor of the interstate. He takes the corner of the building at a run and then has to skid to a stop when he sees it waiting down the path, nearly in the shadows.

It's hunched down on all fours, like an animal, but from what he can see - which isn't much, because it's _dark_ , shrouded in something that can't possibly be normal at all for this time of day - it's mostly humanoid. It turns its head and the glimpse of its face that he gets is all he needs. It'll haunt his nightmares from now on, remaining etched in his memory: sunken, malformed, misshapen to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. It's like someone took out their aggression on it, breaking every bone, and then pushed them all around so that it healed completely wrong.

And the thing is, it sees Stiles, too.

The young woman is still walking towards it, enspelled, drawn to it like a moth to a flame, and Stiles can only sputter and try to turn around - he isn't equipped to deal with this. He didn't expect one to be _out_ here, in broad daylight, luring people with something he can't identify. He hears a growl, and the young woman spins, suddenly hyperaware of Stiles behind her, and all Stiles can think as he tries to backpedal around the corner is _where is everyone else?_

That's all the further he gets. The creature leaps, moving faster than should be possible, fast like a werewolf in the woods, and it's on Stiles before he can muster up another thought. It stinks of something absolutely rotten, meat left out on the counter for too long that's completely spoiled, and if Stiles weren't so terrified that he's about to be eaten, he might have wanted to throw up.

The skin-walker, presses a hand to his mouth, roughly, and Stiles' teeth come down too hard on his bottom lip. The pain that flares through his jaw when the flesh splits is nothing compared to the terrified beating of his own heart.

He mumbles something, a plea, maybe, and he doesn't even know, and it doesn't matter - it comes out muffled by the creatures disgusting, filthy hand. The thing leans forward, nose that isn't a nose at all and is merely a concave dip, something that was ripped from its face with an uneven knife, and then it freezes. It _smells_ him, and it goes completely still.

Then, in a half-second, a time too short to really process, it's gone, and so is the young woman that Stiles had been following.

Stiles sucks in a burning lungful of air, throat on fire. He can't scurry to his feet very fast; he feels sluggish, like he's been drugged, like that time last winter when he got walking pneumonia and dad kept giving him cough syrup with codeine. When his fingers finally dig into the bricks of the building next to him, the sensation has largely faded, though he's still shaken and scared and completely unsure as to why the thing ran off like it did.

"Dammit," he sighs, and pulls out his phone. It takes him a few moments to get enough of handle on his fingers to even figure out how to dial the number.

\--

There isn't much to do to defend against an enemy they can't catch, can barely see, and seems to have the jump on them at every turn - still, Derek stays up all night at the burned-out house, trying to paint as many symbols of protection that he can around the perimeter. He's not really sure how well it'll work. The house itself is drenched in blood and soaked in tragedy, fire and brimstone and misery so embedded in the floorboards. Peter found his eventual return here, but Laura met her eventual end, just like the rest of them, and that sort of thing - that sort of _tragedy_ has a way of interfering with the surroundings in more way than one.

It's worth trying, though, so he does it. Whether or not it works will be seen for another time.

As he's working, slowly painting symbols that Deaton had painstakingly explained to him, Derek lets his thoughts flutter to the pack bonds. Erica and Boyd - he's still holding those, waiting for the two to come back, and he doesn't want to let go. It's hard to let go of connections that he made himself, the feeling of family that lies inherent with that relationship.

He's going to have to do it if he wants to win this fight. Keeping them aloft and stable is draining too much of his power - not for the first time, he wishes that his father were alive to explain the process to him. Laura might have gotten instruction, might have been told about these things, but Derek never was. He's running blind, and not even his animal instincts can help here.

When he drops the paintbrush down to the side of the house, he sighs; it immediately gets lost in the weeds, blending in with the scraggly, drying brush that is trickling in the perimeter from the woods.

Then his phone buzzes in his pocket, breaking the strange reverie of the ritual.

"Stiles?" he asks, after he flips it open and presses it against his ear.

"I saw one," the boy says, sounding somewhat out of breath and a bit confused, and Derek can't hear his heartbeat over the line, but if he could, he thinks it would be quick and light. "Today, near the post office. It was just there, in the middle of everything, and I think it was after some woman."

"Are you sure?" Derek asks.

There's a bitter, mirthless laugh. "Yes, yes, I'm sure. God, I don't - it _touched_ me, it landed on me, and then it just did this weird thing, like you do, where it _smelled_ me, and apparently I don't smell like dinner because it took off and I have no idea where it went."

Derek's chest constricts, painful and sudden, squeezing the air out. "What do you mean it attacked you?"

"I mean it had me pinned!" Stiles exclaims; unhappy and urgent and definitely confused now, frustrated at the lack of knowledge. "It could have done anything, and it didn't, and I don't know why."

The problem is that Derek doesn't either, and he hates this - he hates acting without any real information, he hates that he's fumbling around in the dark. He hates Peter for leaving with the best leads they could have had and for the Argents to have retreated into themselves like they have. He feels so helpless it's driving him mad, and he has to talk down the instinctive need to shift and run just to keep himself from smashing his phone, still held tightly in his hand.

"And I think," Stiles continues, voice dropping a bit, "I think I know how they're doing it. The accidents, I mean. This woman I was following, she seemed possessed. I think maybe they can control people. I remember reading about it on one of the websites, and I didn't think any of it-"

"Stiles," Derek cuts him off. "Listen to me. Stay home tonight. Stay where you are, and I'll come over. I'm going to Deaton first to see if he's got anything else."

Stiles sounds annoyed when he responds, "Why can't I go to Deaton, too?"

"Because we don't know what it wanted with you," Derek says, and then appends, "Or _didn't_ want, as is probably the case, and I'm not taking chances."

There's a second of silence, and then a slightly muffled, "Oh. You're - you're not taking chances with _me_."

Derek doesn't know what he _means_ , doesn't know what that strange little intake of breath was, the sharpness that he could pick out even over the shitty cell reception his property tends to get, and he knows even less what the entire thing is doing to the knot of coils in his stomach.

"Of course I'm not," he says, and he tries for the least sticky answer he can find. "You're human, and they're dangerous."

"Okay," Stiles says, slowly, drawing out the syllables like he's dragging his tongue across his lip at the same time, and Derek can see the action in his mind, the way the corners of Stiles' mouth would pucker and thin with the movement. "Okay," he repeats; he sounds more sure of himself the second time. "I'll see what I can dig up at home, and you come tell me what Deaton says."

Derek snaps the phone shut without saying good-bye. Maybe, if he gives in to the wolf, if he shifts and runs all the way to the veterinary clinic, then the strange, pulsing, aching feeling that has taken up residence in his gut will be banished.

\--

Derek is late, of course, and the only reason Stiles isn't annoyed by it is because Lydia talks for thirty minutes about the problems she's found in the AP American History textbook. They've nearly finished dissecting the various falsities within just the chapter on the Civil War when Derek comes in through the window, soles of his boots skidding over the wood.

His gaze roams to Lydia, who seems unaffected enough to not even bother looking up.

"I thought you'd be alone," Derek says, and it sounds accusatory.

"You told me to go home," Stiles points out, "not to avoid calling anyone. Besides, we want Lydia involved in this."

Lydia looks up, sharp gaze and knowing smile. "I might have some extra information for you."

She's got more than that, but she seems hesitant of Derek still - sure enough of herself to barge her way into the pack itself, settling in like it was hers all along, but not trusting enough to give all her cards away up front. Stiles shouldn't find it as attractive as he does.

Derek just deposits himself in Stiles' desk chair, leather squeaking a bit. "Fine," he says. "What do you know?"

"First, tell us what Deaton said," she shoots back.

She gets a glare, the kind that Stiles used to get before he was pack, without the soft edges that he's only begun to start deciphering. Then Derek turns to him, swirling the chair a bit.

"You were right," he says. "Deaton says they can probably manipulate people, but only for a short period of time unless they've got something really powerful or physical contact."

"Like some kind of artifact?" Stiles asks.

Derek shrugs. "Maybe," he offers. "Deaton didn't really know."

"So these accidents," Stiles says, and swallows hard, "they weren't really accidents. They were caused by these things. Planned."

"And they went after kids because the corpses of children are the most powerful," Lydia adds. When Stiles looks at her in surprise, she raises both eyebrows, nearly to her hairline, and her mouth thins. "I read it in your notes, and I remember things I read."

"But I don't understand why they go after kids and the rest of the town if what they really want is Lydia," Stiles says. He runs his hands through his hair, but nothing makes sense - he can see the dots and he can't find the string that connects them. "Why bother?"

Lydia shrugs. Bits of her hair have fallen over her shoulder, tangling with the gold cord of her necklace - it takes Stiles a moment to realize that she's not wearing silver. Nothing on her is silver, not the studs in her ears or the ring on her finger, and she used to wear it all the time, in the days when Stiles would watch her from across the room during history class, cataloguing every freckle on her skin and every flick of her fingers. He wonders if now, this change, is deliberate - a statement.

"We can't kill them here," she says. "I don't think we can. I think it has to be done in the other world."

"The other _what_?" Stiles asks, and he's thrown. He usually doesn't hear something like that outside of his headphones when he's playing online RPGs at 2 AM and they are planning an epic raid.

She rolls her eyes, obviously annoyed. "Don't be stupid, Stiles. The other world, the spirit world - you know, the place where dead things go?" Then she looks at Derek, and Stiles hadn't even noticed the other man's disbelieving expression. "Don't look at me like that," she scolds. "You're a _werewolf_ , this is hardly the craziest thing you've ever heard."

"If you're right," Stiles says, slowly, trying to piece things together in his head, because this is _insane_ , it's reached levels he's never encountered before, and he doesn't know what half of it means, "then how on Earth can we manage that?"

"I think I can," Lydia says.

There's a moment of silence. Derek gives her a long look, up and down, like a calculating once-over, and then says, "Of course."

"Of course _what_?" Stiles asks.

"It's the reason she didn't turn," Derek tells him, like that somehow explains everything, even though it explains absolutely _nothing_. "She's got it in her blood."

"Um, we're going to have to be a little more clear here for people who didn't grow up with _crazy_ in our lives."

Derek gestures towards Lydia, waving his hand in the air in front of her. "She's magic. She's a dream walker."

Stiles has no idea what that even means, but Lydia perks, face brightening.

"I _like_ that," she muses, head tilted slightly to one side. Her gaze is somewhere past Derek's shoulder, stuck on Stiles' wall, and he's just glad that he doesn't still have those Lord of the Rings posters up. "Ms. Morell just called me a shaman."

"The guidance counselor?" Stiles asks.

"She knows a lot," Lydia replies. She reaches down to pick a bit of dust off of her tights, where it's clinging to the gray material. "Anyway, that isn't the point. The fact is that I think I can kill them. In the spirit world, they're vulnerable - at least enough that I can hurt them."

"But how do you _get_ to the spirit world?" Stiles asks.

He gets a smile that's more smirk than anything else in response. "It's complicated," she says.

"So we just have to let you take care of them," Derek says, thinking aloud, because it comes out sort of like a question and not entirely sure. "While trying to minimize the damages topside."

"You need help," Lydia says. "You need the Argents."

Derek balks, physically, recoiling so much that Stiles thinks he might fall off his chair. Derek looks like he was _struck_ , which is strange all things considered; the relationship with the Argents isn't exactly cordial, not now, not after Gerard, but at least they have largely left each other alone since.

"No," he says, growled and low.

"Listen, this really isn't up to you," Lydia tells him. She purses her lips, eyes narrowing - it's the expression she gets when Mr. Harris tries to tell her that she's wrong in class. "This is bigger than you, bigger than your little merry band. This affects everyone. And you need all the help that you can get - especially since half your pups are AWOL."

Derek looks _angry_. "You don't tell me what to do."

Lydia, to her credit, meets his furious glare with indifference.

"I just did," she says.

"The Argents won't work with us," Stiles points out. The tension in his bedroom has tripled, making it stifling and stuffy. "There's a history there, you know, and it's not just going to poof! away."

"This ends now," Lydia snaps, glancing quickly at Stiles with a flash of irritation across her face. "This whole stupid thing ends now - I don't care what happened. People are dying, and this is what needs to be done, and we're going to work together because we _need_ them."

"You aren't pack," Derek hisses. "There is no 'we' here."

Lydia stands then. Stiles is somewhat terrified that she's going to try and _hit_ Derek, that it's going to start something he honestly isn't sure will end well, and he believes she _could_ probably take on Derek if she put her mind to it. But Lydia doesn't wind her shoulder back for a hit; instead, she tugs at the bottom of her dress, ignoring Stiles' surprised squawk that he'll deny later ever tumbled from his mouth.

She tugs the fabric up over her hip, over the lace of her underwear that is shockingly blue against the white backdrop of Stiles' bedroom wall.

"What do you see?" she asks, and it's aimed at Derek, the same place her eyes are. There's an undercurrent of steel in her tone - it takes Derek a moment, but he deflates a bit, shoulders falling.

"Scars," he says, sounding displeased. It's true. Stiles can see the raised, white scars on her side, curving around with her ribs. The worst is that he remembers that night, remembers her lying on the pitch grass covered in blood and barely moving; he remembers Peter straddling her, crimson on his lips, a stain that Stiles will never forgive him for. It's a mark, a death-sentence, and Lydia is standing with a defiant look on her face like it's nothing to trace over the marks with her own fingertip.

She drops her dress again, lips pursing once more. "I am pack," she tells Derek. "I may be human, and I may not have been your prey, but I'm pack, whether you like it or not. And you need me. Just like you need the Argents."

"They won't listen to me," Derek says. He's slumped now, against Stiles' chair - he's resigned himself to the help, but doesn't look very happy about doing so.

"No," Lydia says, and reaches down to pick up her handbag. "But they'll listen to me."

"What are you doing?" Stiles asks. "It's after 10 PM."

Lydia gives him another annoyed glance. "And the night is dark and full of terrors. We don't have time to waste. I'll tell you how it goes - start thinking of some ideas, because we're going to need all of them."

She leaves without a backwards glance at them, and after a moment, after her footsteps have faded down the staircase and Stiles dimly hears the front door opening and closing, he says, "She still terrifies me sometimes."

"This isn't a solution," Derek grumbles.

"It might be our _only_ solution," Stiles points out. "Do you remember that they practically killed you? We can't touch these things, but she can, and I say we use it."

Derek ignores this. The other man stands, dragging his fingers through his hair, and then says, "We need to put wards on your Jeep."

"What?" Stiles starts. "Wait, no. Are you kidding me? You're not _painting_ my car, Derek."

"It's safe."

"Do you know how much a paint fix costs on cars these days?" Stiles asks. "And the mechanics here in town are starting to pick up on my desperation."

Derek frowns at him, the corners of his mouth tightening. "I wasn't asking."

"One of them offered me a place in their _customer loyalty_ program," Stiles tries; he's aware that he sounds whining, needy, and his wallet is sorely empty from the past few months of freak supernatural attacks that always seem to result in damage to his baby. "Derek, I'm _broke_."

"It's not going to be visible," Derek says, and his frown deepens. "You of all people should understand why this is so important."

"What does that mean, 'me of all people'?"

Derek shrugs. "You don't heal like werewolves do."

Stiles gasps, putting a hand over his heart. "Oh my _god_ , are you joking? I had _no idea_. It's a good thing you are here to tell me these things, because I'm pretty sure that I had 'suicide mission' written in my day planner for tomorrow."

"Your sarcasm isn't helpful," Derek tells him.

"And yet, you stick around anyway," Stiles says. "Listen, even if Lydia gets the Argents to agree to work with us, this still doesn't fix our problem - we need a _plan_ , a good one, and preferably one that includes the least amount of physical pain for me."

There's a moment of silence, and then Derek sits again, back in Stiles' chair, settling heavily against the leather cushion.

"I don't know," he says, and sounds very tired. "I found something today, a doll - it's probably the next victim, but we don't know who it is."

"It could be anyone," Stiles agrees. He thinks of the woman on the street today, and the way she moved like a puppet whose master was pulling all the strings; it sends shivers down his spine to think about, to surrender one's own agency. It's just another thing that these _demons_ , these skin-walkers, these people who have willingly stripped themselves of all humanity, do that make them horrifyingly evil.

Derek drags his hands over his face. Stiles has never really noticed before how young Derek looks like this - without much of a pack, holding together his life by a few threads. It makes something jump up in Stiles' throat. He stands up, without really thinking, and puts a hand on Derek's shoulder. He expects the other man to jerk away, but Derek just sort of slumps into it, boneless and weary.

"You have to let go of Scott," Stiles tells him, thinking back to what Deaton had said about unaccepted pack bonds.

Derek doesn't reply. His eyes are off somewhere else, on Stiles' carpet, focused on nothing - memories, maybe. The man spends too much time trapped in his own head.

"Let go of Scott and give it to Lydia," Stiles says.

"Why?"

"Because she'll take it," Stiles replies, and thinks that she probably already has, offered or not - Lydia Martin takes what she wants, even if it isn't on the table yet. "And you need it."

Derek laughs, bitterly. "This seems to be my night for people telling me what I do and don't need."

"Sorry," Stiles says, a knee-jerk reaction, because he _knows_ how that feels. Nurses in the hospital during never-ending nights, teachers at school with pity in their gazes as they look over their desks. He hated that; he still hates that. "I didn't - I didn't mean to do that. I don't _want_ to do that. I just."

He pauses. "Why don't you tell me, then, what it is you need."

He realizes belatedly that his hand is still on Derek's shoulder. Suddenly hyper-aware of it, he draws it back, and only gets halfway before Derek's fingers clamp down around his wrist and stop him. Derek holds his hand in place, hovering in the space between the two of them.

When Stiles looks down again, Derek is staring up at him. There's something there - something in the way Derek's eyes are kind of open, the way his mouth is slightly parted. There's nothing that screams _Alpha_ on his face, and Stiles doesn't know why that single fact unnerves him as much as it does. His heart is hammering in his chest, his throat, his ears - that must be the pack bond thrumming there, beneath his sternum, buzzing and trembling.

He lets them stay like that for one, two breaths, before the anxious nerves get to be too much for him, and then he tries to force out a laugh because he can't think of anything else to do. "Maybe you have low blood sugar."

"What?" Derek asks - his eyebrows knit together.

"Can that even happen to werewolves?" Stiles tries. He's just babbling now. He tugs his hand free and Derek lets his hold loosen, and even after Stiles has taken a step back, his hand still feels warm, pulsing with something. "Probably can't. Still weird to think about, though."

Derek is still staring at him, and Stiles has absolutely no idea what to say.

"Are you going to paint my car?" he asks.

This seems to snap Derek out of whatever he was in. His face goes back to normal, hardening, mouth thinning. "Yes," he says.

"Don't use chicken blood or anything gross."

Derek sighs. "When have I ever done that, Stiles? You play too many video games."

"I think that one was actually an outdated pop culture reference," Stiles admits.

Derek makes for the window, and Stiles can't figure out why his body has decided to be _more_ upset about this than anything else. He needs to sleep - he desperately needs a shower, a really, really cold one, possibly with ice water. He needs to make lunch for his dad tomorrow and try to pretend that everything is fine between them, and here he is, standing in the middle of his bedroom hoping that the former murder suspect, resident Alpha werewolf doesn't really want to leave.

He keeps all of that to himself, though he knows the jack-hammer rhythm of his traitorous heart is probably giving all of it away.

"When Lydia calls," Derek starts.

"I'll let you know what she says," Stiles tells him.

There's another glance, unreadable, over Derek's leather-clad shoulder.

"Stay inside," the man says. "It's safe here."

"Sure."

He doesn't make much sound when he drops from the window ledge. Stiles gives it a few minutes before he thinks Derek is a safe distance away, and then he collapses on his bed. He tries to bury his head in his hands, and it works about as well as it always did in kindergarten.

"Damn," he sighs. His life is already god-awful complicated enough - werewolves and skin-walkers and things trying to kill him, creatures that can possess people and turn their bodies into soulless vessels, and he's sitting with a hard-on for a guy who could take an entire season of Dr. Phil's psychological advice and _still_ come out a hot mess.

He shifts a bit, but it just makes the stiffness of his denim rub against his thighs, send another pang of _please, self, no_ through his body, and he gets up, because the shower will hopefully help to clear his mind and has the added bonus of washing his hormonal, terrible fantasies down the drain when he's finished.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Work drama has prevented writing time, and I apologize!

Allison seems surprised when Lydia shows up outside her front door.

"Are you okay?" she asks, immediately, because Allison is one of them and her mind instantly goes to the important things. She lets Lydia come in, lets her push her way past the door, and then adds, "Did something else happen? Was there another attack?"

"No," Lydia says. "Is your father home?"

The other girl's forehead furrows. "Uh, yes? I mean, if you were hoping to work something here, I don't think it's a good place for it. The house isn't set up to hold much by way of supernatural things-"

"I know," Lydia interrupts. "You've got wards under the Thomas Kincaid paintings. I actually need to talk to your father. And you."

Allison is quiet for a moment - there are gears turning in her head. Allison is smart, she's resourceful, and she's in the thick of things. Lydia doesn't know how much Scott still tells her, with the strange, odd rift between them, but there was obviously enough to merit an invite to the last pack meeting, and Lydia knows the other girl is putting things together, bit by bit and inch by inch.

"Okay," Allison says, slowly, after a second, "I'll go get him. Do you want to wait in the living room?"

"Sure," Lydia replies. "And I'd love some tea."

It takes a few minutes for Chris Argent to get to the living room, with Allison in tow, and if he isn't surprised at the sudden house visit, then he's good at hiding things. That, Lydia is already aware of - she has to give him credit for keeping so much away from the rest of the people in Beacon Hills.

"Lydia," Chris says, polite without being inviting.

"Sit," Lydia tells him. "Because I have something rather important that I need to talk to you about."

Chris and Allison share a look, something unreadable, but they both do as asked - Allison on the chair next to the couch, and Chris across the room, nearer to the windows. There's a tactical reason for it, an advantage, and Lydia's opinion of the man goes up even though it means he's already treating her like a potential threat and enemy.

"This is about Derek Hale," Chris starts.

"Of course it is," Lydia agrees. "And I think you know why I'm here. There's a lot of shit happening right now, and I know that you two have this _feud_ going on-"

"I'm a _hunter_ ," Chris interjects.

Lydia just shrugs. "Whatever," she says. "I don't actually care. What I do care about is getting these soul-sucking shape shifters out of my town, and we need you to help us accomplish this."

Chris leans back, expression giving nothing away; there's a small twitch to his fingers. Behind him, Lydia can see a blossoming network of wards and symbols, painted along the pane of the window on the inside, near the wood. As a backdrop to the man who seems weathered from life, it makes an interesting contrast - Lydia tries to reconcile her own memories of Chris Argent, Allison's father, and what she knows of him through Peter's recollections and thoughts. It's jarring, dissonant and strange.

"I have to admit, I'd hoped you wouldn't fall into this mess," he says. "You deserve better than to be involved with Derek Hale."

"Don't be stupid," Lydia snaps. "Ignoring the slight to Derek himself, I know you were there after my attack, at the hospital. I know you are aware of what happened. So whether or not I wanted this is irrelevant; I'm part of it now."

Chris looks to Allison again, who, at the side of Lydia's vision, gives her father a little shrug.

"You're not a wolf," Chris says, to Lydia, as his gaze strays back to her.

"I wouldn't go that far," she disagrees.

He sighs, heavily, and looks to the ceiling. "And you want our help."

"Mr. Argent," Lydia starts, "look at what's happening right now. This isn't really about us anymore. It's about you, and them, and this town. So unless you want more children to die and more people to be victims, I think you ought to consider your options. Aren't you supposed to be preventing these sorts of deaths?"

"Dad," Allison tries, and though she doesn't say anything else, there's something there, the undercurrent, a language only the two of them speak.

"You want me to help Derek Hale," Chris says.

Lydia shakes her head. "I want you _both_ to help Derek's _pack_."

"Allison isn't-"

"Yes, I am," Allison interrupts. Her hands are in her lap, fingers curled and twisted. If Lydia could pick one person to have at her back during a fight, Allison would be it - she's made of something stronger than most people give her credit for, sharp as a tack and dead-on with her aim. "Dad, I'm already a part of this, and I'm going to help them with or without you."

Chris' gaze is made of ice. "I thought I told you to stay away from this," he says to his daughter.

"And I thought I told you that I was going to do what I thought was right."

After a long moment, Chris turns back to Lydia, though his expression hasn't softened. "You want me to help Derek's pack," he repeats.

"I want you to help _me_ ," Lydia says.

"Why you?"

"Because, Mr. Argent," Lydia tells him, "I _am_ Derek's pack."

\--

It's not like he has to choose a time to do it - there is no ritual involved, nothing sacred or special. The fact that so much of Derek's life revolves around something that can be done as easily as deciding what cereal to eat for breakfast is absurd, and he wishes again that his father were still alive, that Laura were still alive, so that he could ask them questions about the real nature of the pack, of his Alpha powers.

He sits on the decaying porch in the morning light of the sunrise and stares off at the tree-line. He can't hear or smell anything amiss; if the skin-walkers are nearby, they are far enough away that he won't be noticing them. He's happy to at least have that back - losing his senses, losing his sense of _self_ , was almost too much after losing everything else. Derek's life has been stripped away in layers like someone trying to get to the center of an onion and caring nothing for the discarded pieces.

He takes a deep breath. He searches around for the bond for Scott. What Stiles had said was correct. Scott will never accept the bond, will never be part of Derek's pack, and Derek's _known_ it. He knew it, felt it in his bones, and couldn't bring himself to take the invitation back. He feels like a failure. He wonders if each unaccepted bond feel this way, like a weakness - it was his fault, somehow, throbbing deep inside his chest, and he wasn't a good enough Alpha to make Scott agree.

Derek runs his hands over his face. There's no ceremony to it. There's just the gentle exhale of the breath through his lips, and then he lets go, gives up, stops holding onto the one-sided bond he'd offered to Scott all those months ago. Afterwards, he doesn't feel any different. There's nothing magical or immediate about it; just a man, sitting with his head in his hands, who has finally realized something that will never come to be.

He can feel the bonds for Erica and Boyd, too, sitting there next to Stiles and Isaac, and he should let those go. They don't even know where Erica and Boyd _are_. The Alpha pack is long-gone, most likely, driven out by the skin-walkers and the threat incoming, and so are Derek's two betas, but they were _his_. Erica and Boyd weren't like Scott, weren't strays that Derek picked up to add to the pack; they _made_ the pack. They were his own creations, forged from his own teeth and blood, and that means something more than Derek is willing to admit to himself.

He leaves those bonds where they are. Someday, maybe he'll be strong enough to let those go, too.

He does try to relax his shoulders, muscles uncoiling. He searches out with his senses to sweep the forest. There's nothing amiss - just the sound of insects and the small animals that move beneath the brush cover. 

Stiles had said he should offer it to Lydia.

It doesn't surprise Derek at all when he does, when he reaches out with what he has, with the innate _pull_ of the Alpha - it's a bit like the moon, like the way it calls to him. The moon creeps under his skin and so does the Alpha, the part of him that walks on four legs, the bit that's meshed and intertwined with the human part of him so much that sometimes he can't tell the two apart. He reaches out and initiates the bond and finds the other half already there, already taut and snug and firm; it feels like Lydia. It feels solid and self-assured and ready, just like her face when she flips her hair over her shoulder.

Derek feels a bit reassured then. Stiles was right. He feels better with the accepted bonds, with the completed agreements. The wolf inside is happier, more content. The Alpha powers will slowly seep back in as the bonds take hold and solidify, and he'll need that, because the loss of his own abilities was a sore spot that recent events had continued pushing at.

It's day time now. Derek gets up, because there is work to do.

\--

Derek's so paranoid about the skin-walkers following Stiles' strange encounter that he generally refuses to let Stiles go out anywhere alone anymore.

"Listen, I _get_ it," Stiles says, as they are in his car - his car because it's warded, even though he thinks that Derek feels like he's slumming it when riding shotgun in the Jeep sometimes, "but what if I just wanted to run to Wal-Mart to get some turkey bacon for my dad's breakfast or something?"

"Then you park as close as possible to the building, go in daylight, and walk quickly in and out," Derek tells him. "Make sure you are always around someone who could see what was happening. I'm not sure they can control multiple subjects at once."

Stiles turns down the next street, clucking his tongue. "You do know that this is starting to sound really, really creepy, right?"

"You're a potential target," Derek tells him, glaring. Like Stiles telling him that his crazy paranoia being creepy is any worse than telling him that his penchant for lurking in the woods is similarly off-putting.

"Dude, I'm not some fragile, weeping flower," Stiles says.

Derek just gives him another look, annoyed and weighty, in the huffy way that only Derek can pull off, and Stiles' shoulders slump as he relents.

"Yeah, yeah, okay," Stiles grumbles, making another left. "I'm easy to hurt."

"You aren't a wolf," Derek states the obvious as they pull into the grocery store - if anyone sees Stiles hanging around with the twenty-three year old potential murderer, his dad is going to end up hearing about this, so for Stiles' own sake, he hopes that Derek stays in the car.

He throws the gear shift in park.

"What if i was a wolf?" he asks, very quietly, and truth be told, he is just as surprised as Derek when the words come out of his mouth.

Derek takes a long few moments to reply. "Do you want the bite?"

"You've never offered it to me."

"No," Derek agrees. "I didn't think you would say yes."

It's not like Stiles has never considered it. It's pretty hard to hang out with so many creatures of the night and never think about it, and he'd be lying if he denied having some fantasies of what he would gain with the bite that he never had before - strength, speed, the ability to finally get hot people to date him (at least if Scott is any indication on inherited skills post-supernatural turning). But the long and short of it is that Stiles doesn't _want_ to worry about the full moons because he's afraid he'll kill someone, he doesn't want to have another layer of things he's hiding from his father that may eventually lead to the man's heart attack.

He curls his hands around the steering wheel, staring at the red four-door sedan parked in front of them.

Instead of answering, Stiles asks, "Would you turn me if I asked you to?"

Derek's expression is unreadable. It looks kind of strange, kind of open and confused at the same time, like that night by the pool when this whole crazy pack thing officially started between them. He holds Stiles' gaze for a second and then turns away, towards the window, and Stiles can't read his profile any better.

"If I turned you," Derek says, carefully and slowly, "you'd be my beta."

"Thought I already was, being pack now."

Derek shakes his head. "You're human, so you're pack but- you're pack, but you're not a _beta_."

"What am I, then?" Stiles asks.

"I don't know," Derek admits. "Just you, I think. You're not a part of the wolf hierarchy, because you exist sort of on the outside. But you're still part of the pack. Biting you would change that. It would put you in that role."

Stiles takes a deep breath. "Why does it sound like you don't _want_ me to be a beta?"

"You'd be wasted as a beta," Derek says. He seems surprised again; maybe the statement was a shock to him as well. There's a somewhat uneasy silence, and Stiles isn't sure what to make of it - because he really isn't sure what this entire conversation means, or why it feels like they are standing on one side of an invisible line waiting for the other person to finally cross.

Stiles wonders what Derek can hear. He has to be able to hear Stiles' heartbeat then, the quick thudding, the spike in his pulse.

"What do you want me to be?" Stiles asks.

Whatever Derek might have said gets cut off when an old lady returns to the car next to them and starts loading her groceries into the trunk. The spell inside the Jeep snaps, gone, and Derek shakes his head.

"Go get what you need," he tells Stiles. "Do it fast, so we can get you back home where it's safer."

"I thought my car _was_ safe now," Stiles grumbles, annoyed and frustrated and oddly relieved in a way he can't identify, as he grapples for the door handle to get out.

\--

She's a bit surprised when she gets the text from Scott to meet at the veterinarian's office in town. She shouldn't be, because somehow, that makes sense - there has to have been _someone_ here watching over things, knowing what was going on. As she drives there - Derek had insisted on warding her car, too, though Lydia thinks she'd probably be able to take the demons easier than they would - she thinks idly that if Deaton is involved in this mess, maybe Ms. Morell is, too. It's too convenient not to be a connection between them.

Scott and Allison are there when she arrives, but they are the only two. Deaton, the vet, reaches over to shake her hand.

"Lydia," she introduces herself; his handshake is firm and to the point, and her opinion of him rises.

"Yes," he says, like he already knew. "It's good to meet you."

Scott and Allison aren't sitting together, exactly - there's a few inches between them, a space that Lydia doesn't quite understand but is starting to piece together. A few months ago, they would have been intertwined, nearly on top of each other; a few months ago, when Lydia had no idea that werewolves existed and hadn't been marked and used by Peter Hale.

Those few months seem like a very long time now.

"Did something happen?" Lydia asks. "Another attack?"

"No," Deaton answers, instead of Scott. "I called everyone here because I believe I may have found an answer to what the skin-walkers are here for."

Lydia assumes that the vet's office has been warded as well, to give them another place to go where they don't have to worry about being attacked. She glances around to see if her assumption is true, and it takes her awhile to see the wards - glimmering, just a bit, like a subtle sparkle to a lip gloss. They are subtle and well-hidden, and she is impressed. Deaton must really know his stuff.

She tugs Allison off to the side for a bit while they wait for Derek, Stiles and Isaac.

"What did your dad say?" she asks.

Allison shrugs. Her gaze is still on Scott, standing and discussing something with the vet. "He's still thinking about it. After Gerard, he really..."

Lydia remembers that night, too.

"Yeah," she says. It won't help any of them to dwell on it, and Chris Argent, of all people, should probably know that. Still, she can't change the man if he stubbornly clings to old notions of good and evil.

"I think he admires you," Allison adds, and one corner of her mouth quirks upwards in amusement. "You were pretty brave, coming in to talk to him."

"I just surprised him," Lydia says.

"I think you surprise a lot of people."

Lydia shrugs, unconcerned, as the final three arrive inside in a flurry of conversation snippets. There isn't much to the vet office - it's just a few rooms, with back kennels that Lydia can hear a few stray barks from, and smaller freezers for the medicines Deaton keeps on hand.

"I'm just saying I don't want to spend most of my time in that house," Isaac says, as they take their places in a circle around Deaton's table.

"And _I'm_ just saying that it's better than living in a _subway station_ ," Stiles sighs.

Deaton holds a hand up for silence. "I don't want to take any more of your time than necessary, so I'd like to get this started."

"Not an attack?" Stiles guesses.

"No," Deaton says, and shakes his head. "But I did some digging into the local lore and came up with some information that I believe everyone needs to have."

"Local lore?" Derek asks.

Deaton pulls out a map, rolled up in a slim tube of paper. As he flattens it out on the table, Lydia leans closer to see - it's Beacon Hills, or at least the general geography of the area drawn topically. She can see the river and the uneven ridges of elevation that dot the landscape.

"We've been assuming that this was about you and your pack the whole time," Deaton says, to Derek, who is staring down at the map with a puzzled frown. "But we were coming at this from the wrong angle."

"Tch," Stiles clucks, tongue against the roof of his mouth. "I forgot the case files I swiped from my dad's copies in the car. I'll be right back."

He disappears out the door, and Lydia leans in closer, following the curve of the river with her nail.

"Beacon Hills wasn't always Hale territory," Deaton says.

"No," Derek agrees. "It's been ours for generations now, but before that, it wasn't anyone's."

"Not true," Deaton tells him.

Derek looks up, eyebrows high. Deaton spreads his hands to either side, like the map will explain everything, and Lydia can't quite see the connection yet, which is irritating her. She feels like it's right there, under her nose, and she can't find the final variable.

"Far before anyone settled here, Beacon Hills was sacred ground."

"Sacred ground?" Scott asks. "You mean like a burial ground?"

"Not necessarily," Deaton replies. "Sacred ground can be many things - burial ground is one of them, but it can also be a place where rituals were conducted, or a spot of specific power that was tapped."

Lydia's gaze lingers on the mapped terrain in front of her. "You're saying that they came here for the _land_ ," she says, slowly, things clicking into place, "and happened to find us here already."

Deaton nods.

"Didn't your family know?" Allison asks Derek.

"Peter might have records," Derek admits, "but he took those with him when he left. I don't exactly have a library to consult with."

Allison looks guilty, then, a bit - Kate is strong on the air between them, thick and tangible. Lydia thinks of her dreams, of the forest and the spiral it makes. She'd never made the connection to the land itself; she assumed it was Peter's influence, the lingering effects of the bite that didn't take and her own strange blood, but it was the _trees_ that were creating everything.

"Did you ever wonder why so many strange things have been happening here?" Deaton asks, again, to Derek.

"You're going to have to be more specific," Isaac says dryly.

"The kanima," Deaton offers, and Lydia swallows down the pang of ache that brings to her throat, choking her. "Peter coming back to life. These aren't normal things that werewolf packs encounter - something is fueling these abilities."

Lydia vaguely thinks that she might be included in that list, too, were she not standing there as part of the discussion.

"Why now?" she asks, and holds Deaton's gaze with more ferocity than she probably needs, just to try and counteract the clenching sensation in her stomach. "Why did it all start now if Derek's family has been here for years?"

"I think it was the fire," Deaton says, softly.

There's a long moment of silence. Scott is staring down at the map like he's soaking it all in, trying to make sense - Allison looks guilty again, retreating inside herself. Derek's hunched over with shoulders open. It must be hard to think that the fiery end to one's entire family is what caused the strange surge of supernatural activity in the town.

"Why?" Derek asks.

"It goes back to the idea that the land is sacred. That much death, that much pain - it triggered something. Whatever magic had been here was opened, sort of like a floodgate. And it's been seeping into everything ever since."

Lydia wants to ask if it made her - if she was always immune, if she was born this way, or if it's an aftereffect of the situation that Deaton is describing.

"And the skin-walkers came for the magic, and found us?" Isaac repeats.

"Which means they don't want us here," Allison says.

Deaton shakes his head. "It means they have no use for you," he tells them. "You are the ones benefiting from this magic, this power. Derek, your pack could be _strong_ , very strong, stronger than any other packs with this."

"I wasn't supposed to be Alpha," Derek says.

"No," Deaton agrees, "but you are, and that can't be changed."

"So if he's so strong, shouldn't he be able to kill them?" Isaac tries.

"It's not just him," Lydia says. She gets it now - she gets what's happening. She understands why her power was used, why Peter picked her; she is part of this. She's connected to the land, to this magic. Her dreams are spirals into what's really going on, and it's taken her this long to understand her own role. "He can't kill them, but I can."

The others all look at her. Deaton doesn't seem surprised; he seems pleased, in a subtle sort of way. Derek just looks wary. If Lydia didn't know better, she'd think he wasn't happy about giving up the power he held.

"You can't do this alone," she tells him seriously. "You need me."

"So, what, the magic makes the pack strong, but it has to be joint leadership?" Isaac asks.

Derek bristles, so much so that even Lydia can sense it, but Deaton shakes his head.

"Not two," he says. "Three. It's always three. Look at the symbol painted on Derek's back. Look at the major religions. It's always three - there's power in threes. Ancient magic is no different. Heart, body and mind, they are connected in everything."

Realization is cold and hard and grabs her heart, and she has only a split second to really _get_ it, because Scott figures it out first. She doesn't know how, but it's Scott, and sometimes he understands better than any of them.

"Where's Stiles?" he asks.

Derek's face goes completely slack.

"Derek!" Lydia cries in warning, but it's far too late - he's gone, out the door, moving with werewolf speeds she can't match. She follows and bangs her hip on the counter in her haste - it burns up her side, throbbing in time with her pounding heart. She can hear the others behind her, footsteps loud and echoing.

There's nothing in the parking lot. It's dark and deserted. Derek is standing in the middle, spinning, trying to sense whatever he can, but Stiles' Jeep is still in its parking spot and it looks untouched. He probably never even made it to the trunk for those files.

"Derek!" she tries again. It's far too late; he's not listening, not comprehending. He's probably beating himself up inside his head, because the office is warded and Stiles' car is warded but _the parking lot isn't_. "Derek, don't!"

He takes off into the trees without looking over his shoulder, and Lydia turns, frustrated and terrified, to the others waiting behind her.

"Stay here!" she yells. She takes a few more steps to follow and then growls in irritation. She yanks the heels off her feet and offers a small apology to the shoes, Steve Madden and brand-new, before smacking them hard enough against the asphalt to break the heels off completely.

She turns again, hair catching in the corner of her mouth. "Just stay here!"

"Lydia!" Allison cries.

But Lydia can kill them, and Derek can't, and he's got too much of a head start with his speed. She starts off into the trees and isn't even sure where she's going, because she can't _sense_ like he can, can't smell and track, and it's just adding to the bubbling, almost overwhelming panic that is waiting to strike her down. She pushes past low-hanging branches that whip at her face and feels like she's in her dream again.

It makes her pause. She stills, trying to center herself. In her dream, she could follow the feeling of the land, and she can do that now, too. She closes her eyes and reaches out, grappling for whatever she can find to hold onto.

Her wolf is there when she opens her eyes again.

"Lead me," she gasps. "He's going to be killed, you have to get me to them."

The wolf takes off like a silver bullet, and Lydia follows, and only hopes they aren't all too late.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December was INSANE, and I'm in the middle of my holiday across the ocean, but I felt so bad about not even opening my writing program for a whole month. :x

He can't see anything.

The forest around him feels alive - and maybe it is. Maybe that's what Deaton was saying, what really happened. And Derek can feel it crying, he can feel something tug and pull and twist, and he can't really see anything because he's blind. He's blind and running, desperate, through the sea of trees that sigh and sway, and the bond in his chest has constricted and coiled like an aching stone.

He never should have let Stiles go out to his car alone. He should have _known_ \- Stiles said that the things found him, that he was attacked and it was on him but it didn't _do_ anything; he'd said that it had smelled him, and Derek hadn't known what that meant, but he's pretty sure he does now. An upturned root cuts his hand, and he can feel the heat well there for a second before his healing takes over, and he knows. The creature had smelled _him_ on Stiles.

He runs, until his lungs ache, until even the wolf in him is exhausted. He can smell Stiles but there's something else there, something decaying and _wrong_ , and Derek knows that the skin-walkers have him. The wolf wants to howl in rage at what's been taken from him, and Derek just keeps moving.

Eventually, he finds a clearing. There's a fire going, and Derek can both see and smell the smoke - so acrid that it stings his nose, igniting his sense. It's almost so strong that it blocks out everything else, and maybe that's what they were counting on, but Derek can still smell Stiles. He can't remember a time that he couldn't track Stiles.

That, too, says something that his wolf chooses to ignore for the more pressing matters.

Before he reaches it, he finds one of them, and his perception is a few seconds behind his instincts. He is on the creature before he can even think about it, claws sinking in deep and canines slashing. With strength he can't ever even remembering _having_ , not this much, not this frenzy, the skin-walker doesn't have time to shift into its animal form before it loses an arm, dropping somewhere in the brush. Derek can smell the stink and rot of the blood that's spraying, and it's getting on him, too, and it's just adding more red. Everything is red; everything is hot and _bad_ , and his wolf rips open the creature's throat and lets the body drop like a sack to the ground.

The other one - maybe only one, because the fire is messing with Derek's senses, clouding everything, making things fuzzy - takes off into the night, and there's only a belated, sad sort of sense of pride that he finally managed to take one down. 

Then he turns, and realizes that the one he killed, the one that should, by all accounts, be dead, is gone. He probably did nothing more than startle it, and it will slink back to regroup and regrow the lost limb and he'll have accomplished nothing.

Stiles is there, by the fire. As he takes a step closer, Derek realizes what the horrible smell is coming from - there's a body. There's a corpse there, freshly killed and still warm, and Stiles is kneeling by it.

Derek shifts back to human, instinctually, without willing himself to. He drops down, ignores the smack of pain that's quickly swept away, and grabs for Stiles' shoulders. The blood and gore is smeared across the boy's mouth, a grotesque, ugly crimson stain. Whatever they were doing, Derek interrupted it, and Stiles has snapped free of the mind-control with the skin-walkers gone.

He smells wrong. He smells _broken_.

"Stiles," Derek tries, and it comes out awful and mangled, hardly something he'd imagine from his own lips. He only knows that he has to try to stop whatever started in motion here. He has to counter-act the horrifying spell Stiles has been hit with.

"Oh my god," Stiles chokes.

Derek pulls his chin closer. He's shaking, and so is Stiles, and Derek can't tell if it’s his own body trembling or just the reverberations of the one in his arms. He opens Stiles' mouth, trying to remember to be gentle and failing because he's so god damn terrified.

"Throw up," he commands. "Stiles, you have to."

He probably didn't even need to stick his finger down the boy's throat - one look at the carnage around him, at the blood slicking his own hands and the splatters that have made their way onto his jeans, and Stiles is retching up everything, bent over, stomach heaving. It probably won't help - Derek can _feel_ it. It doesn't matter, because he let this happen, he let Stiles go outside, and he's going to lose this.

He's going to lose everything, all over again.

Stiles is shaking now, harder; he's sobbing, and the action is so strong and jerky that it might be tearing him apart completely. Derek just wraps his arms around Stiles' shoulders, trying desperately to hold on - as if his presence and will could keep him together, unbroken and in one piece.

"Stay with me," Derek rasps, against Stiles' neck. He buries his head there, trying to absorb everything he can. "It'll be okay."

"It won't," Stiles manages to get out, between furious, disgusted, anguished sobs. "The fire - when the fire goes out. That's it."

Even now, at his worst, at the lowest, he's thinking. His brain is still going, still turning. Something hot pricks at the sides of Derek's eyes, and he thinks it's just the smoke again. He's so close that Stiles' terror is overwhelming him. It's the only thing coming from Stiles now, the only thing that Derek can sense.

"I need you," Derek says. It's more of an admission than he thought he was still capable of, and it almost hurts to say.

Stiles' heart skips and thuds beneath Derek's palm, and his whole chest hitches when he draws in another breath. "Derek."

The fire is almost out. It's mostly smoke now, mostly embers with barely enough heat to stay lit. Derek's squeezing Stiles' shoulders so hard he knows it must be hurting, Stiles doesn't have the strength to combat it, and he doesn't know what to do. He's going to lose. He's going to lose _this_.

"Remember, what I said," Derek tries; he starts, he doesn't even know what he's saying, he's only aware of the _need_ to get it out. "About - I don't want you to be my beta. Stiles, you're more than that. You - you need to be something else. Not a beta. An equal. I can't - I can't _do_ this without you. And I think - I think I always knew, but was... I'm - I'm not good with this, I don't know how to do this."

He sucks in a deep breath, and can't smell Stiles anymore.

"Stiles," he says. His wolf is howling, furious. He shakes the boy, harder than is necessary. "Stiles!"

But the body in his arms is unmoving. There's nothing there, because the fire is out. Derek can't breathe, can't think; he can only barely feel Stiles' heartbeat in his chest, can barely hear it, and it's not like it should be. It's even and slow and not _Stiles_ , not anything, barely alive.

Stiles' eyes are open, but they aren't seeing anything.

"Derek," Lydia's voice says, from behind him. She sounds out of breath and smells of sweat, like she was sprinting through the woods after him, and all of this registers only dimly at the sides of Derek's awareness.

He can't speak. He buries his face in Stiles' neck, and there's nothing to say. This was his fault, his mistake. And now there's nothing left.

\--

They take Stiles back to his house, only because there is nothing else to do and the Sheriff isn't home. There's a hole in the pack - an aching, obvious hole that Lydia can feel like the twist of a knife in her gut.

"I don't understand," Scott says, in the hallway, looking in through Stiles' bedroom door to the unmoving form on the bed and the hunched, miserable figure sitting next to it. "I thought they were after you."

Lydia can't fault him, even if it stings a bit to hear. He's lost his best friend.

"I don't think they ever were," she says, trying to dig up the things they'd talked about with Dr. Deaton. It feels like a lifetime ago, standing in the vet's office; a lifetime that is gone, now, and wiped away by the vacant expression on Stiles' face. "I think... I think just wanted this place. And they found us."

"Why Stiles?" Scott asks.

"He's gone, Scott," Deaton says. It's said gently, but it still feels like a punch to the gut, and Lydia is sure she isn't feeling it as strongly as the others. "There's nothing left."

"What did they do?" Scott asks, anguished. He sounds small - small and unhappy, like he's been kicked. He huddles against the wall with his arms wrapped around his chest, trying to make himself as little as possible.

Deaton's expression reeks of sympathy, and it grates on Lydia's nerves; she hates it. She hates that look, that feeling, that projected empathy that does no good whatsoever.

"They split his soul," the doctor explains, "and he's not himself anymore. He won't be. They've taken what makes him Stiles and stripped it away."

There are tears glistening on Scott's cheeks, glimmering in the hall lights, and Lydia has to look away. She can't stand to see it.

"How?" Scott moans. "Why?"

"Because of Derek," Lydia replies. "Because of the pack."

Scott is looking at her when she turns around, eyes wide and round and terrible.

"They knew it would tear the pack apart," Lydia tells him. There are goose bumps on her arms, making all the hair stand on end. She wants to be anywhere else, anywhere but here - standing in this hallway, feeling like her world has been turned upside and gutted. "They knew that it would take Derek down."

Deaton looks as if he agrees, but Scott's expression is clouded with confusion. His gaze drops to the floor, to where the carpet meets the painted walls. Maybe he was here when it was painted. Maybe it was done in the post-burial haze of misery, the desire to alter the memories after one of the fixtures was gone. Lydia can understand that; her life has been changed in the same way, for the same purposes, to mourn her own loss after Peter took out all the important parts and made them his own.

"What are we going to tell his father?" Scott asks, head in his hands. "What are we going to _do_?"

Lydia turns to Deaton. "You said they split his soul."

"Yes."

"Where did they send it?" she asks.

There's a second of nothing, and then something passes over the man's features - understanding, maybe. He must know; he's the voice of reason, the knowledge that drives the pack.

"The other world," Deaton says, slowly. He inches away from the wall. "The spirit realm."

Inside the room, neither figure has moved. Derek is hunched at the side of the bed, face hidden by the backs of his hands, fingers splayed over his forehead and in his hair. He looks like a statue, an exquisite display of agony, carved out of marble and ice and left perched to guard Stiles' crumpled form on the mattress. They will have to come up with a story - _something_ to tell Stiles' father. There is nothing they can say. There is nothing _to_ say.

_We're so sorry, Sheriff Stilinski. We lost your son._

"I can get there," Lydia says. She can't pull her gaze away from the unmoving scene inside the bedroom. "I can get his soul back."

"How?" Scott asks.

"I don't know," Lydia admits, "but I know I can. I can get to the world - I can find him. I can bring him back."

_We're so sorry, Derek. You have no one left now._

"What do you need?" Scott asks.

Lydia pushes away from the doorframe, nails a shocking magenta against the taupe-washed drywall against her hip. "Ms. Morell," she says.

\--

Danny doesn't ask questions, which is nice. He has to know - Lydia assumes he knows something is going on, but doesn't want to be a direct part of it, and therefore doesn't ask. He searches the school database without requiring the reason why, and Lydia gets the address texted to her phone ten minutes later.

She doesn't think about what the other woman will think when Lydia turns up on the front stoop, banging on the door at one in the morning. She can't think about it, because she can't think about anything; if she does, she'll lose it. She'll focus on Stiles' unnatural, haunting silence and Derek's radiating surrender, and she'll fall apart.

She's fallen apart too many times in the past year.

"Ms. Morell," she calls, when her repeated knocks are not immediately answered. She'll wake the neighbors, and she doesn't care. "Ms. Morell! It's Lydia Martin, please answer the door."

The guidance counselor looks intrigued but not surprised when the door finally swings open. She's in sweats, but her make-up is still on, so she wasn't asleep.

"Please," Lydia says, without preamble. "I need your help, please."

Ms. Morell opens the door wider to allow her to slip in. "Are you okay?" she asks, and there's a chill that runs up Lydia's spine - they are watching her. They are out in the bushes, in the trees, and they are watching her right now. She turns around and pushes the door closed with both palms flush against the material, slamming it harder than is necessary. She feels better, but not safe.

"It's not me," she says. "It's Stiles. The shapeshifters, they did something to him-"

"Shapeshifters?" Ms. Morell repeats. Again, she doesn't sound surprised.

Lydia should have known, but there's no time to really process it. She files it away for later, for when she isn't being pulled in five different directions. "They split his soul and took it to the spirit realm. And you know I can get there, just like in my dreams. I need to go and get it back."

Ms. Morell ushers Lydia inside, and sits down heavily herself in a rickety-looking kitchen chair. The area is sparsely decorated and minimalistic; it looks more like a motel room than a lived-in apartment, but Lydia can feel the buzz and hum of protection wards lingering within the walls and beneath the rugs. This is a woman who knows what she is up against.

"You care about Stiles," she says.

"Of course," Lydia snaps, strangely defensive. She struggles to smooth over harshness, and adds, "We all do. We want him back. We _need_ him back."

"Why?"

"Derek needs him back," Lydia says.

The other woman's gaze is sharp and knowing, like a razor-thin blade. "Yes, I think he does."

"So you know," Lydia tells her. "You know about the pack, and the land, and all of it. You know that it takes the three of us."

"Magic often comes in threes," the woman agrees without really agreeing at all. "Heart, body and mind - it keeps things balanced."

"And I'm the mind," Lydia says. Maybe she's always known. Maybe, deep down, it's why she was always so keen on covering up her own intelligence - it was safer that way.

Ms. Morell gives her a slow, approving nod. "The body can't function without the heart."

"But the mind can."

"Can it, really?" Ms. Morell asks.

Lydia purses her lips. "It can enough. Enough to get him back. I know you can send me there - there has to be some way. A spell, a ritual. Something to send me deeper than where I get with my dreams."

"This is dangerous stuff you're talking about."

"I don't care," Lydia hisses. "I'm doing it, with or without you. But without will take longer, and I'm in a hurry, so I'd appreciate the help."

There's a smile on the other woman's lips that seems out of place given the circumstances. "It's a lot that you came to ask for help at all," Ms. Morell says. "I think we've made a lot of progress."

Lydia's first reaction is to get defensive and angry, unsettled by the surprise introspection. But there's no time for that, and the woman is right; the Lydia from a year ago never would have asked for help. It took being ripped apart at the seams and sewn back together for Lydia to reach out to others.

She should be more annoyed about that than she is. Instead, she's mostly just tired, exhausted from the draining night and the constant, pulsing worry that lays just beneath her skin. It's driving her forward, giving her resolve.

This is growing up, perhaps. This is becoming who she needs to be.

"Then you'll help?" she asks.

"Yes," Ms. Morell says, and pushes herself up from the chair. "But we're going to need to get a lot done before this will be possible."

\--

He keeps the lights in Stiles' room off, because he can't stand to look at the boy's face. There's nothing there - no Stiles, no quips, no endless, nervous chatter. He's like a canvas that has been gesso-ed over, the way his mother used to do when she was in her studio in the office. He can still see Stiles' face in the dark, of course, and can still hear the shallow breathing and faint, horribly steady heartbeat, but it's better without the lights on.

Derek doesn't know how long he sits there.

He can't find his own feelings. They are lost, lost with the pack, lost with the bond - it's unaccepted again, cut off, in the cruelest way possible. Without Stiles, there is no bond; without Stiles, there is no _pack_ , and he's known it for longer than he cares to admit. It feels like finding Laura all over again. There's an endless winter, nothing but darkness, and he can't find his way in the cold.

After awhile, after hours of people going in and out, moving and worrying and speaking in hushed tones that Derek doesn't really register, Lydia returns. She crosses the space of the room and turns on the light, unblinking, determined and steely. She kneels at his feet - her hands on his knees are bizarrely comforting. The others didn't dare touch him, but Lydia has always done the things that other people were afraid to do.

"Derek," she says. He's never heard this tone in her voice before. It's the way people spoke to him after the fire.

_Derek, we're so sorry. We're so, so sorry for your loss._

"The Sheriff is coming home soon," Lydia tells him. "I'm going to get Stiles back, but we have to tell Sheriff Stilinski something first. We need you here for this."

"There's nothing left," Derek manages to choke out. His mouth is completely dry, tongue sticking to the roof.

Lydia's fingers tighten around his kneecaps. "Bullshit," she spits. "I'm going to bring him back. Don't you dare fall apart on me, Hale."

He raises his head, to meet her fiery gaze.

"I've been there," she says, voice dropping low. "Don't you think I've been there? When your uncle burned me from the inside out, and there was nothing left. And I'm not letting you give up, because you are _better_ than this. You are _more_ than this."

When Derek still doesn't respond, she flushes, angry, and adds, "He wouldn't _want_ this, Derek."

It feels like a kick to the gut. "How do you know?"

"Because I _know_ him," she snaps. "And so do you, if you'd just wake up."

Derek tries to think. He tries to focus on something else, something outside this room - there is so little there. He extends his senses outward, reaching, feeling for the land and the trees and the connection still there, faint but rhythmic.

He runs his tongue over his bottom lip. "The Sheriff is coming home?" he repeats, slowly.

He can _hear_ her relief, palpable and sweeping through her body. Lydia's hands go to the sides of his face, pressed against his cheeks. She kisses him swiftly, perfunctorily, and then stands up.

"We have to tell him about everything," she says, "and for that, we need our Alpha."

Derek tries to process this. Things are moving slowly, like they are stuck in something thick and heavy, dragging weight along behind them as the seconds tick by.

"You're going to get him?" he says, because it's taken this long to really register. "Stiles?"

"Yes," Lydia says; her eyes soften, skin releasing a bit. She looks younger and older at the same time. He wonders how they all missed her before - this woman who holds herself like a goddess, who takes what she wants and what she's owed without asking, who slots herself in like she's always been there. This must be what Peter saw, what Peter sought.

Derek reaches without really thinking about it. He just knows that he needs the reassurance of the contact. His fingers find hers and twist, until their hands are entwined together. He breathes, in and out, one screaming, pained lungful at a time.

"We need to talk to the Sheriff," he says.

"Yes," Lydia repeats.

"I need you," Derek says, very softly, almost inaudible to his own ears. He has to lick his bottom lip again, because it's gotten dry, just like his mouth. He feels like he swallowed cotton. "I need you to be here with me."

She squeezes his hand. "I know. I will be."

"I need him."

Her hand is on his cheek once more - her touch is light, gentle. It's an anchor when the rest of the world is awash in the storm. "I know that, too," she says.

"Lydia," Derek starts, and can't get any further, because it's too much. He can't think about Stiles - he can't think about how he's gone, empty, a shell without anything left inside. It hurts too much to really focus on, so he shifts, until he's thinking about anything else, and he knows he's going to have to force it back when they speak to Stiles' father.

As if on cue, there are headlights in the driveway, and the rumbling of a car engine that Derek can feel reverberate from yards away.

"He's here," he says.

Lydia stands up, and offers him a hand. Her nails are still perfect; for some reason, this makes Derek relax a bit more.

"Are you ready?" she asks, eyes sharp. Without giving him a chance to answer, she adds, "Because, right now, you have to be."

\--

Sheriff Stilinski doesn't say anything for a long time.

There isn't anything - no tears, no anger, nothing. He sits across the kitchen table with both hands out on the surface, fingers slightly curled, and says nothing, and Derek thinks that might be the worst thing of all. He has a strange feeling of déjà vu, only reversed, because back then it was the Sheriff trying to break the news gently, and the Sheriff telling him about people who had been lost.

Derek thinks if he's had enough of anything, that he's had enough of losing people who are important to him. He thinks of Erica and Boyd and the dangling remnants of their bonds, and has to focus on the empty mug sitting by the sink, unwashed and forgotten.

"Werewolves," the Sheriff says, quietly.

"Yeah," Derek agrees. There isn't anything else to say. In light of all the things he should be apologizing for, the way he was born isn't high on that list. He's not sorry that Stiles got involved; Stiles was _always_ involved, before either of them knew it.

Sheriff Stilinski exhales, slow and loud, and his shoulders seem to cave in on themselves. He looks much smaller than Derek remembers him being.

"My son..." he trails off. There should have been more, but Derek doesn't know what it might have been. There are a thousand things the man sitting across from him could say; a thousand more that he could do, _should_ do, would be well within his right to do, and he does none of them.

The man raises his head. Derek knows the haunted look in the Sheriff's eyes - he sees it every day in the mirror.

"You're going to save him?" he asks, to Lydia.

"Yes," she says. She sounds so confident, Derek wants to believe her.

"And you're not a werewolf?"

There's a pause. Lydia bites on her lip, a bit, smudging the line of lip gloss. "I'm... not," she replies. "Not technically."

"Not technically," the Sheriff repeats. He doesn't ask for clarification. "And Stiles?"

"Isn't," Derek says.

The Sheriff's gaze is hard. "Are you going to-?"

"No," Derek cuts him off. He shakes his head. "No, he doesn't want it."

Sheriff Stilinski doesn't ask Derek how he knows that. He doesn't ask about Lydia's strange, vague response, and he doesn't ask about why they are the two sitting at the other side of his table, breaking the news. He doesn't ask any of the questions that other people might, and Derek can't figure out why this makes him respect the man all the more. This is a man who has already been through hell and back - maybe he doesn't want the answers he doesn't need.

"What do I do?" the Sheriff asks.

"Keep him alive," Lydia says, "until I finish what I need to do."

He looks at Lydia for a long moment, and then nods. When the Sheriff's eyes turn to Derek, they are harder, but there doesn't seem to be malice there. Whatever was between them - the misunderstandings, the false accusations, the arrests - it's gone now, washed away by something more important.

Derek sees a man who will be crippled by guilt and regret if Lydia isn't successful. He doesn't want to be responsible for another wasted, broken life.

"Okay," Sheriff Stilinski says, more exhale than anything else. "Okay."


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally finished this, which was the most important thing! Haha, sorry to everyone who had to wait so long. ;____;

"This is an incredibly powerful, dangerous ritual," Ms. Morell says, even as she is pulling cushions off the couch so that Lydia has room to lie down horizontally. "What you are going to want is a second, in case something goes wrong."

"Allison," Lydia says, without hesitation; by all rights, the honor should go to her. Allison has been her best friend, and Allison is strong enough to be able to do whatever might be necessary. Lydia isn't fool enough to believe that nothing will happen to her once she crosses the invisible line - she'll be opening herself up, splitting her own soul in two, and leaving her body empty behind. If anything else wakes up in her skin, she trusts that Allison will know that it's not Lydia staring out from behind empty eyes.

Allison nods, though her expression looks distinctly unhappy. Lydia turns to her, hands on her hips, mostly just to keep her hands moving in order to distract her mind from what she's about to do.

"Did you bring your crossbow?" Lydia asks.

"Yes, but-" Allison pauses, teeth gnawing on her lower lip.

Ms. Morell comes back at that moment holding several old dream catchers - the style that people used to buy at faux-reservations, thinking that they could hang one over their bed and all would be better - dripping feathers and beads that look very old, half-tarnished and worn away.

"If anything happens, you may have to kill her," the older woman says; it's done gently, but it's still harsh. Like a blow, struck straight across one's face.

Allison recoils slightly, but not much - Lydia's opinion of her choice rises. "It's not that," she explains. "It's just that a crossbow isn't going to be the best thing if I have to... if something else comes back in Lydia's body."

"What's the other option?" Lydia asks.

Allison reaches into her boot, bits of her dark hair escaping from the high bun she's sporting at the back of her head, and tugs free a small knife. "I brought this, too."

"Good," Lydia says. When her friend looks to her in question, Lydia manages a watery smile that she hopes appears more confident than she currently feels - her heart is in her stomach, thudding painfully like a rock she ingested. Part of her can feel Stiles' absence; maybe that's the whole messy bond business, this stupid and irrevocably invaluable web she's gotten herself completely enmeshed in. "I know I can trust you for this."

"Lydia," Allison starts.

If she finishes, Lydia might not be able to. She shakes her head, cuts Allison off with a wave of her hand, and sits down on the couch. It's now or never, and she's always been a now sort of girl.

"I'm ready," she announces to Ms. Morell. The woman lights several sticks of incense, and the powerful smell of the burning herbs is strangely comforting when it hits Lydia's nose - like something grounding. She can use that.

"Did you make an amulet?" Ms. Morell asks.

Lydia pulls free a large, oval brass locket from her pocket, holding it out in her palm. "It was the best I could do on short notice," she explains, somewhat brazenly, aware that it sounds like a thin excuse even to her own ears. "But I got something from everyone."

"Everyone?" Allison asks.

When she pushes her finger against the clasp, the locket springs apart. "An earring you'd forgotten in my room. Dirt from the Hale house. Scott gave me a shirt, and I cut off a small piece of it. I wasn't sure what to get from Stiles, but he'd lent me a pencil once, so I used the eraser. And this hair is from Isaac."

"The whole pack," Allison says, quietly, in an awed sort of tone.

"The whole pack," Lydia repeats.

Ms. Morell nods once, and takes a seat in the armchair across the coffee table, which has been covered in things that look like they came straight out of a new-age pagan shop. "It's good. It will help anchor you to reality."

"How will you know how to find him?" Allison asks. She has her dagger in her hand, fingers clutched so tightly around the handle that her knuckles are already turning white, and Lydia feels a sharp, hot pang of pride run through her form. This girl has watched her mother die, her grandfather turn, and her world burn away; Lydia feels safe in Allison's hands.

Lydia shrugs. "I guess I'll just have to go by feeling."

"Use the bond," Ms. Morell suggests, and flips the light switch so that the only light in the room is coming from the flickering candles set up in a small circle around the couch. "It's your best guide to Stiles. You are both a part of it; you can use it to track him."

Her heart is pounding a jackhammer rhythm against her ribs. Lydia lies back against the armrest, lacing her fingers over her stomach around the amulet. It feels warm against her palm: good, steady, stable. She can use that. She _has_ to use that.

"Do it," Lydia commands. She can't wait any longer.

"Good luck," Allison whispers, and that's the last thing Lydia remembers before Ms. Morell starts chanting in a language she doesn't know, sounds and phonemes that are unfamiliar to her ears, and she finds herself falling into nothingness.

\--

At least the other two with him are quiet, moving through the brush and trees with an unearthly sort of grace that comes with the ability to _feel_ the world around one more; the last thing Derek would be able to handle now is tromping. Stiles would be tromping, only because he wouldn't know any better or have the senses to realize it, and thinking about Stiles only causes his nerves to go into overdrive again, so Derek has to force the thought away. Banish it, to the back of his mind - he needs to compartmentalize if this is going to work, if he is going to stay on his feet.

When his family had burned in their house, he'd cried for two days, and then abruptly stopped. Somewhere, his mind had segmented. The counselor in New York had said that it was a result of the trauma. That his young mind had broken off that part of itself in order to survive. It was what happened when someone was pushed to the breaking point and the brain was desperate for a way to avoid shattering completely.

_Trauma_. Derek has had about enough of that word. It's hardly enough to really explain what's happened in his life.

"I don't like this," Scott whispers, when they stop and Derek tries to stretch out with his feelings to find the root of the _wrong_ ness in the forest. "I feel like we're walking into a trap."

"We are," Derek says.

Scott bristles, angry energy and coiled muscles. He's smarting from Stiles - they are _all_ smarting from Stiles, but Scott wears everything on his sleeve. "So if you know, why are we _doing_ this? Last time I checked, every time we've walked into a trap it's gone really badly for us."

"We have to keep them occupied so Lydia can bring him back," Derek tells him. Scott isn't pack, so he can't reach out and twist the bond to get those wrinkles ironed out. Behind him, Isaac is oddly quiet, and Derek wonders if his beta is picking up on his own signals.

It takes longer than it should to isolate the smell he's looking for - he's losing his abilities, _again_ , bit by bit, and this time, it was exactly what they were hoping for. They did this to _him_ , to break him, and the sudden, overpowering sensation that ripples beneath his skin is almost too much to handle. There is a hand on his shoulder, fingers tight and anchoring, and Derek takes a deep breath. Isaac keeps his hand there for several seconds, until Derek gives a little _push_ on the bond to tell the other boy that he's okay.

Okay enough, anyway, and that's what counts.

"Do you think they're waiting for us?" Scott asks, quieter this time.

"Yes," Derek answers.

"Okay," Scott says, and there is acceptance, just like that, right there; acceptance that he can't walk out of this one, and willingly found the way in. Stiles' life is riding on the line, and Scott knows it just as well as Derek does. "Then I guess we should be ready for them?"

It's more statement than question, but that's alright. Derek is one step ahead of them, already having found the anomalies, the _wrong_ ahead of them in the trees - he's shifted, letting his canines dip down and sink into his lips when he growls. It feels good to let go. Maybe he needed this, this adrenaline-pumping high, ever since he found Stiles with blood smeared across his chin.

"Keep them occupied," he growls, and it comes out muffled with the changes in his jaw, but he knows they understand him all the same. Then he lunges forward, letting the wolf propel him into the abyss and the tree branches sigh above his head as he runs.

\--

Lydia is not in the trees this time.

She should have expected this - because this time, she's in deeper. There's more of her here now, splintered, waiting to be put back together. She closes her eyes for a second and reaches deep, with everything she has, until she can feel the pulse of the land beneath her feet. This is grounding in a way that should never be. When she opens her eyes once more, she feels more in-control.

She isn't in the trees, because she's in a desert. At least, it's the closest word she has to describe it - the sands aren't yellow and duned, but silver, lit with a hazy sort of light from above, and there is no moon or star in the sky that could be supplying it. The air feels hot, too humid, sticking to her skin and feeling decidedly alien; if she hadn't come here purposefully, she might think this were a nightmare. Something about it doesn't feel right - out of place, a step behind or ahead, drifting along her world at an odd angle that doesn't quite line up straight.

She begins walking, because she has to find Stiles. She wishes she could sense something, because at least a feeling would alert her of the direction she should be going. But she feels nothing but strangeness, of disconnect, and hopes that the way she is going is either correct or not too far off from her destination.

It takes a few minutes - maybe, because time here seems to both run and stop at the same time - for her wolf to show up.

"I need your help," Lydia tells the animal, as it pauses a few feet away from her and just _looks_ , with eyes that feel like they pierce through all the armor she has. "We have to find him before it's too late."

The wolf stays where it is as Lydia approaches, and lets her tangle her fingers in the soft fur. It feels right, somehow, to be connected by touch like this. They are the same thing, really: two sides of the same coin. There is a sharp tug of loss at Lydia's heart, the way things could have been, and then her hand slips away from the fur entirely.

The wolf just snuffs a bit at her feet, and begins to walk.

"Okay," Lydia says, and follows.

\--

"Derek!" Scott yells, and Derek hears it only at the edge of his field of comprehension. The skin walkers are shrieking, howling - inhumane sounds that cut at his eardrums they sound so wrong. They rush with stilted gaits, legs half-forming as they move, until they are nothing but the animal pelts the humans wore: a bear, a jaguar, and a coyote.

Derek moves for the jaguar first. Instinctively, he knows this is the most dangerous of the group - an animal built for grace and hunting, coiled muscles and soft, almost noiseless stalking. His wolf bristles at the stench of it. It's not just wrong - rotted inside and out, an _abomination_ of mish-mashed things that shouldn't be together - but it's also a threat. A threat his wolf knows, can identify, and attempts to act accordingly to.

He ducks and rolls, hoping to take the big cat with him. The creature's claws are already out, and Derek passes by so close that they scrape at the fabric of his t-shirt and tear it, the fabric hitching around his neck and then giving way. He can smell the acrid breath of it against his cheek. He spins, claws out, growling at it in hopes that the animal instincts will pause and give him a half-second more. He gets less than that, but there is a split-second hesitation that he still sees, that his _wolf_ sees, and he knows that there is still something of these animals in the shapes the mutated humans have assumed.

That could work to their advantage. The coyote is the only animal among them that is used to working with a pack, but even then, they are scavengers before hunters; there might be a weakness here, in the tenuous glue that holds them together.

Scott has taken the bear - bigger, but slower than him, with more firepower but less grace and speed - and Isaac, the coyote, who is built like a wolf, all sinewy muscles and sharp muzzle, but missing the vital killing instinct that makes the wolves what they are.

Derek tries to make sure they are always in his field of vision, that he can always feel them through the web: Isaac bright and connected, and Scott a faint hum that he knows will never line up.

The jaguar roars, and Derek's wolf wants to howl back at it.

\--

The not-sand eventually gives way to caverns. They came from everywhere and nowhere, so dreamlike that Lydia has a moment of doubt that she is indeed where she needs to be. The rocks split and arc above her head, cool and rough, and as she walks through them, the light gradually diminishes until she can barely see in front of her. She has no shoes on in this world, and sorely misses them, because the stones beneath her feet are not smooth. She keeps dragging her heel over a particularly rough patch of rock and wincing, keeping her hand firmly on her wolf's hindquarters so that they aren't separated in the darkness.

After awhile, the light disappears completely, and there is nothing but shadow.

Lydia _feels_ things behind her; it reminds her of the forest maze, but different, because these things are not the shape shifters. They are something else, something that _dwells_ here, and it's making all the hair on her arms stand at end.

"Faster," she whispers to the wolf, but she probably didn't need to. The wolf's gait has sped up a bit, as if it, too, can sense the alarming entities trailing them through the caverns twists and turns.

She is so focused on what is behind her that she completely misses the second of warning she gets when her wolf growls, and then the sound hitches up to a whine; a moment later, they are both falling, and Lydia finds herself submerged in something that should be water and _isn't_. She floats as if she is on the surface, but she is not wet. It's dry, like what drifting through space might feel like, but cool against her skin.

It's also filled with things at the bottom, leeches with human hands, fingers that coil around her ankle and tug her down.

She gets a small shriek in before they have her beneath the top of whatever the strange substance is. Fake water or no, she still can't breathe in it, and as she struggles to loosen her legs from the dead hands' grasp, she has a vivid, terrifying second of clarity when she wonders if she can drown in it the same as any other water.

The hands let go as she sinks her nails into the flesh, and she dimly hears a muted scream of anger. She breaks the surface, sucking in air greedily - it's just like the time the shape shifters pushed her into the water, into the whirlpool that went against all laws of nature. She gulps down two lungfuls, and then she is back under, more sets of cold fingers clamped hard against her ankles.

They yield when she scratches at them, but the lack of oxygen and the pressure in her chest is making her tired. She can't keep this up and keep making it up to the air just to breathe. Her abdomen contracts, painfully, and her lungs are burning. She makes it up one more time, a desperate gasp of air, and then she is back under.

She thinks, wildly, that she can't die before she's found Stiles.

Then there is a nose at her arm, the underside of her bicep, and her wolf snaps at the hands with powerful jaws. There is another of those terrible screeches, half-dead and not wholly human, and Lydia breaks above the surface in a mad scramble to find the shore. She can't _see_ anything, and there's panic that is overtaking her mind - all she can think about is _air, life, land, breathe_.

She grapples wildly for something, _anything_ , that could save her. Her fingers briefly skit across something solid that feels like rock, but it is immediately gone. There is a current to the not-water river that she hadn't noticed, and she is caught in its sway. Around her body, half-submerged, her wolf is still growling and fighting off the hands, but Lydia knows that the animal is reacting to her own panic.

She is going to die. A wave of not-water hits her face and pushes her back under, twisting her and turning her until she doesn't know which way is up. Perhaps this is her fear - perhaps this world is testing her with her greatest fear, and is using the shape shifters attack in the forest for motivation.

Suddenly, like a lightning bolt, Lydia understands.

She's spent the last year fighting things she couldn't stop, and even knowing that, she struggled anyway. It was exhausting and useless, and she never made any progress, and she knows why.

Because there are some things that cannot be fought.

There is still terror, lodged deep and hard in her heart, and it is flaring up with such pain she thinks she could die from that alone. But Lydia is tired of running from the fear. It will always be there, always with her, always just behind her - and if she cannot run, then she has to adapt.

She stops struggling. Beside her, snarling and angry, her wolf pauses, too. Lydia reaches out her hands to the creature, bunching her fingers up in the pelt that doesn't feel wet at all, merely weightless, suspended in the substance, and lets the current sweep them both away.

\--

The jaguar's claws sink deep into Derek's shoulder. Derek hisses and twists, and at least succeeds in jarring them out, but the pain laces down through his arm and all the way to his fingers. Whatever it is, these things are so wrong that he can feel it down to his bones when they get a hit in. The claw wounds _burn_ , the way wolfs bane does when it breaks skin, like an infection.

To his left, Isaac has succeeded in getting the coyote pinned back against a tree, but the cornered animal is running on instincts now, and is snapping so fiercely at Isaac's face that the other man has to stumble back to avoid his nose being taken off by it. There is blood streaked down the side of his face, from a wound that looks black-tinged and angry.

Scott is faring only a little better. Derek can't feel him as well, has to concentrate too much to do it, and wishes his powers of perception were high. The alpha is fueled by Lydia and Isaac, but the other strings - they are holding him down, chaining him to the human side. The bear roars, and Scott screams back, and both sounds are like a cacophony of aggression and murderous intent at the sides of Derek's ears.

He ducks down just in time to let the jaguar go sailing over his head. He gets a swipe of his claws up at the creature's exposed belly, but barely that; the animal is twisting, hissing, and its teeth tear through the skin of Derek's forearm, cutting a long line from elbow to wrist.

The pain that explodes through his form is almost deafening. He crumbles - his right arm is useless. He can just barely feel his fingers through it all, coated in blood and already growing cold; he won't be able to hold out much longer with only one set of claws, but he turns and slices up anyway, grazing fur and nothing else.

"Derek!" Isaac cries, and it's oddly belated that Derek hears it. Maybe his beta could feel his own pain through the web.

He wants to tell them to run. To leave, to retreat, to save themselves and lick their wounds in the safety of the trees, but Derek can feel like a choking stone in his gut that even the trees won't save them now. The shape shifters have polluted the very ground with their poison, and the land is giving way to their pull.

Derek grasps his limp wrist with his other hand, and has to fall down to his knees again, using the muscles in his legs to propel himself over and across the jaguar's back as the animal lunges once more.

"Derek!" comes another cry, and this time, Derek can't tell which of them it came from. Whatever venom is in the jaguar's teeth is already working on him. The edges of his vision are going hazy; he is losing his senses, going human, to the weak and vulnerable form that the big cat will tear through in less than a minute.

He lifts his head, seeing Scott in front of him with claws extended and canines bared, and Isaac off to the right with wide-eyes. He wants to shout, to tell them to leave him behind, but nothing comes out before the blackness claims him.

\--

Lydia is choking when she comes to again. Her body instinctively convulses, seeking anything it can find, and that's when she realizes that though she is still suspended in the not-water, it's no longer deep and sitting up, she is free of it. She coughs up nothing, lungs aching with the beautiful pang of still being _alive_. It takes her a moment before she can stretch out and find her wolf, in a similar state, whimpering in a way that sounds awfully battered.

There is light again, and she thanks whatever deity is watching out for that one.

She drags herself up the embankment and just slumps there for a time, breathing in so deeply with her face pressed against the dirt that granules of it are catching on her lips, in the corner of her mouth. She spits some of them out, but can't find it inside to be bothered by it - after all, it means she's still breathing.

When she thinks her trembling muscles can handle it, she pushes herself up to her feet. Her balance isn't steady, but it will do enough. Her wolf seems worse for the wear, and barely moving; off-kilter and almost drugged by whatever it was that swept them down and into the next phase of the dream world.

"We'll make it," Lydia says, with a sudden, intense sweep of fierce pride for the creature at her side. She leans down and throws her arms around its neck, and it feels very right when its muzzle finds the groove between her collarbone and her neck. "I promise we'll make it out of here."

It's a stupid promise to make, considering her wolf doesn't exist in the real world outside the dreams, but Lydia thinks that the animal is placated by it. She gets a lick to the skin, feeling damp but not wet at all, and then she stands, brushing off bits of dirt that have embedded themselves in the palms of her hands.

She is still in a cavern, but it's like an expanse of cracked, dry earth instead of rocks this time, and she can see everything with the hazy, odd sort of sun shining above her head.

They walk.

It feels like half a lifetime passes by - and maybe it does, because Lydia can't tell anymore. She is afraid, right down to her core, that if she lingers too long here, she'll lose the ability to rationalize that. She'll forget what the world felt like and what she came here to do. Already, her steps are getting less urgent, as if something is tugging her into a sluggish pace and she can't quite figure out why she wants to fight it.

She looks down at her feet, frowning, attempting to dislodge the sensation from her legs, and sees them: footprints. Footprints that aren't her own, that are a little bigger and a little wider. She crouches instantly, finger tracing a rough outline of the closest one, and her wolf mimics her movement. She isn't sure if she or the animal realizes it first, but it doesn't matter - it thuds against her ribcage like a hammer.

"Stiles," she gasps.

The footprints lead off into the distance. The feeling of wanting to slow down is still there, but Lydia can focus now, on Stiles, on the ache in her heart that his absence left. It's barely there, but she can touch it, and it's more than she's had in awhile. That she can _feel_ the hole where he should be - that means she has to be close. It's sending a pang through her veins with every thudding beat of her own heart.

The funniest thing is, she almost misses him, and has to skid to a halt to avoid running right past him.

"Hey, Lyds," he says, and her heart jumps out of her chest.

"Stiles," she chokes, again; without instruction, she lunges for him, fingers wrapping around the hands held loosely in his lap. He's sitting on a rock, perched like he's been there for awhile, looking comfortable and entirely in one piece.

She wants to cry, but she is past that part - she found him, and that's the important part, and even though the swell and crest of emotion is nearly overpowering, she fights it down. They still have to get out.

He grins at her, crooked and a little off. "I knew you'd find me."

"Stiles, thank _god_ ," she says. She is trying to compose herself, but she's finding it harder than she expected. His hands in hers make her feel _whole_ again. "We have to get out of here."

He cocks his head to one side. "Why?"

"Because," she starts, and has to stop. _Why_ , exactly? She can't remember. It's frustrating and awful, and the worst thing is, she can _feel_ the dream world poking at her thoughts to make it seem less important. The problem is that she can't fight it. She licks her dry lips and tries to focus, but she can't seem to: her mind is going blank.

"We have to go," she says again, slower this time, and less sure. At her feet, her wolf growls half-heartedly.

Stiles looks down at the animal, and seems a little surprised.

"Did you find that here?" he asks, and makes like he is going to pet the wolf and just kind of loses his drive halfway. His hand stays where it is, poised in the air, and Stiles makes a puzzled expression down at the wolf's head.

"No," Lydia says.

"Is it yours?"

The wolf keens, a sharp whimper, and pushes at the inside of Lydia's hand with its muzzle. Its nose is warm and wet.

"Yes," Lydia answers. Or, is it? She can't be sure. She isn't really sure what they are doing there, standing, when they could be... sleeping. Sleep sounds like the most wonderful option she has. Something keeps her standing, but she isn't sure what, and part of her wants to fight it.

She's still holding Stiles' hands, and his thumb grazes over her knuckles.

"Let's just sit here," Stiles says, with that same quirked smile.

"No," Lydia tries, and she has to push the words out just to form the syllables correctly. Her mouth feels dry, stuffed full of cotton. "I think - I mean, we need to... not."

"Why?" Stiles asks again.

She can't find the answer. It's _maddening_ how she can't find the answer. There's something at the edge of her awareness, something important: the thing that was driving her. But it's hazy and she can't reach it, and when she tries, a fog descends down upon her shoulders, heavy and bulky. It makes her want to sit, and her knees nearly buckle from the weight of it.

Her wolf barks, sharp and high-pitched.

"We need to," she tries, struggling to stay awake when her eyelids are drooping down of their own accord, "get... need to get... Derek."

"Derek?" Stiles repeats. Lydia's legs are numb. She falls to the ground in an ungraceful heap. Her arms feel like they are back in the not-water pool, sort of floating in a weightless sky; it's nice, actually. There isn't anything to worry about here. Then Stiles' hands are hard and squeezing too much, driving a wedge of pain up to her elbow. "Derek!"

"What?" she asks, sort of bleary. She feels as if she just woke from a particularly strong dream.

"Lydia!" Stiles cries. "Lydia, wake up! Derek! We have to get back to Derek!"

It's so comfortable here. There's nothing wrong, nothing to fear. She is pretty sure that something was frightening her back home, and the absence of it is wonderful. She could close her eyes and sleep for years, and wake to the same peaceful environment.

There is a sting of pain as teeth sink into her ankle, and she yelps, throwing herself to the side with an exclamation of anger.

Her wolf looks guiltily up at her, but it was enough to break the spell of the world on her.

"Oh my god," she gasps, scrambling upright. They were almost _lost_ ; she came so far and she almost gave in to it. She would feel more shame from that if she weren't overcome with terror that they were too late. "Stiles, we have to get back!"

"Focus!" he yells. He's panicked, and she can hear it in the edge to his voice. "How do we get back?"

Lydia squeezes her eyes shut, concentrating.

"There's a link," she says. She reaches for him, and finds his hands waiting. "Stiles, we only have one chance at this."

"Go!" he commands.

There's a wave of fear, so thick it makes her nauseous. "Don't let go!"

"Just go!" he yells, and grips her hands so tightly her arms are tingling. "Lydia, just-"

\--

There's something hot in his hands. It's in his arms, his legs; it spreads like a cold sweat across his entire body, until he can't feel anything else. It's not bad - in fact, it's the best he's felt in a long time. He pushes himself up with muscles that are both repairing themselves and shifting into something else - something further. His body, used to the adjustment, is suddenly struck by the strangeness of what's happening. Instead of stopping at the usual transformation, it keeps going. He can feel the creak and snap of bones that slip apart and then re-align, the skin that stretches too thin and then thick and tough.

He _is_ the wolf. He feels the earth shudder beneath his hands, and ebb and flow just like the sea against the seashore. The trees seem to sigh, all at once, and Derek feels that, too. He doesn't even have to focus to feel Isaac, bunched up beneath the blood and tissue, warm and pliant and _powerful_. The beats of his heart bring up the rest of the feelings, the rest of the bonds.

Lydia, sharp and hard-edged, but shining like a diamond; Stiles, fitting in to all the cracks and wrapping himself around them, a shield. Derek feels them both jump into consciousness once more, and the relief he feels is so palpable the wolf shudders and sighs.

The jaguar pauses in mid-lunge, paws hitting the ground in a hurried, shocked rush.

"Holy shit," Scott breathes.

Derek can breathe the land. His body is the earth and his blood is the river; in the back of his mind, beyond reach but waiting there, for when he's ready, are the voices of the others who have held this form before him - the true alpha form. He is one of them, a collective mind, full of shared memories and lore and an unavoidable _truth_ that binds them to the moon and the stars and the expanse of open sky in the darkest parts of the night.

"Oh my god, Derek," Scott is still going, unable to stop himself. "Holy shit, dude, you're a _wolf_ , I mean - like, a real _wolf_ , a real-"

"Alpha," Isaac finishes.

Derek can feel Isaac's acceptance, his compliance. It washes over him like a wave. Isaac is wholly and unconditionally _his_. So are Lydia and Stiles, the other parts to him, the heart and the mind that make him who is he: make him _whole_. Lydia feels smug and assured, like she always has, and Stiles - there's nothing but a rush of emotion there, too complicated to sort through now, but as hot and pleased as anything Derek has ever felt.

He tugs on that, feels it rush over his head, make him stronger - and he howls.

\--

Lydia gets there before he does. Stiles thinks maybe his body is struggling against him now, having gotten used to the time when he wasn't exactly using it - and boy, _that's_ weird, and he'll have a lot of time to angst and muse over that, but there isn't that luxury now. He's gasping for air and out of shape, and Lydia is a few steps in front of him with her hair streaming out behind her like a war banner.

He _feels_ Derek before he sees him.

"What happened?" Lydia demands, panting and still giving orders. Scott and Isaac - both alive and safe and _human_ , no longer shifted - seem sort of shell-shocked. Lydia keeps going, doubled over a bit, one hand at her throat. "Where are the shape shifters?"

"Uh," Scott says, and looks a little green around the edges. "All over the place."

That's when Stiles notices that there are bits of muscle and skin in the tree nearest to him, hanging over a branch that's near his face. He'd throw up if he was fully aware of himself again; as it is, he just sort of flings himself away from it. There's blood everywhere and he's only just now _sensing_ it, a delayed reaction from whatever thuds of power he's getting from Derek.

Who is a wolf, a full wolf, a _huge_ wolf that is so much more than a wolf, growling in the center of it all with blood smeared across his muzzle and teeth.

"Oh, _god_ ," he moans, and recoils a bit.

"Wow," Lydia says, sounding far too appreciative of Derek's handiwork.

Derek appears to notice them, then - he shrinks back down, fur receding, until he is just Derek again, and before Stiles even notices him swaying unsteadily, he feels that, too. Derek drops down to all fours, gasping towards the ground.

Then he looks up, eyes open and fuzzy and _completely human_ , and Stiles is stumbling forward before he knows that his legs are moving.

"Derek," he thinks he says, somehow, maybe a breath and maybe something more - either way, it doesn't really matter. They are _here_ , he's _alive_ , and Stiles is suddenly there before he realizes it. He throws his arms around Derek's shoulders and just feels him, drinks in the hitching breaths and the heaving shoulders, of the skin marred with sweat and blood and bits of other things he doesn't even want to know about.

Derek's arms are tight, so tight, almost cutting off his air, and it doesn't even _matter_ because he's breathing Stiles' name into his ear, against his temple, in every wave and sweep of his hands across Stiles' back and shoulders. Derek's arms go, if possible, even tighter, and Stiles wonders if it's possible to be joined just like that, flush against one another, never letting go.

He isn't sure how long they stay like that, pressed together like one of them was just, oh wait, _not alive_ , before Scott clears his throat uncomfortably.

"So," he says.

"Well," Stiles from Lydia, and without looking, can _see_ the flip of her hair and the quirk of her eyebrow, "I _did_ tell you I'd get him back, didn't I?"


End file.
